A few years ago, by chance, I received a box full of donated medium format negatives from an unidentified source. The box sat in my closet for several years, until I recently rediscovered them during a move. Sifting through these negatives I was drawn to the diverse personal histories that lay before me. These images are a visual time capsule consisting of evidence of the human experience.
Similar to a detective or a museum collector, always searching to find missing pieces of a story, I am compelled to scrutinize and catalog this record of human experiences, interpreting this history. These images were intended to document an accident or injury, in one form or another, as tangible proof that the event occurred. I hope to reclaim and preserve these events, ranging from the mundane to the life changing, that shaped people’s lives. By cataloging and juxtaposing images together I hope to create a visual anthology made up of recorded fact and artistic re-contextualization.
These images are a sampling of life that happens in between the well-documented good times of holidays and birthdays; the sometimes-unpleasant moments we usually don’t record. These images are a window into private circumstances in unknown peoples’ worlds. As an artist, who has been trained in the visual language of photography, I don’t approach these images just as an historical record but as a starting point for creative exploration. I feel a strong desire to learn from these images and that it is my duty to recycle them in a unique visual context.
