PHOTO and MEMORY
My memories of America are glamorous and clichéd. Like tinted photographs, faded brown and instantly nostalgic. A youtubed Super 8 of highways, old, low cars, motels, neon. A girl in denim. A guy in sunnies. Americana. I wore a lot of red, I remember. I was often in bathers by a pool, or not by a pool. I watched highways pass for hours out the window. Saw a hundred sunsets. I loved the desert. I never grew tired of seeing mountains in the distance. I would stare at them and grow still. They were enormous, the biggest mountains I’d ever seen. I would study them as though checking they weren’t two-dimensional, because they were like photographs. My memory of real mountains is of being within a photograph.
My memories must be like so many others’. All the photographs I’ve ever seen of America are my memory of it. I now own part of the dreamscape of American roads, landscapes, cities and towns - images which are everywhere, film, television, art and the internet. And they all represent my memories perfectly.
All my photographs are like everyone’s photographs. Except for the unremarkable ones - those that have our faces and bodies captured in awkward poses. Sometimes so excited my face is strained in an excess of expression. Others in a fit of irritability, unloving, expressionless, perhaps bored. Artless photos, badly framed and lit. Photos I’d never show anyone, that wouldn’t interest anyone. And yet these are some of the most precious now, because they are the behind-the-scenes photos, capturing something which was never intended. They are not presentable, but they are an accurate record of our holiday. Our plain, graceless, unsuspecting selves.
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