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Markers: Memory

We all have memories of growing up and I was lucky to have done so in the woods of a college town. After selling our home on the South Shore of Massachusetts, our family moved to Amherst so my father could study civil engineering when I was seven years old. Here, I was neither a “townie” nor or a professor’s kid and thus existed somewhere in between. Just outside of our apartment complex, we were allowed to roam freely: down the dirt road, up the hill, into the swamp, or around the cemetery. After weathering some tough times in later adolescence and high school, I moved to Boston to attend art school. I later took up an ambitious project dealing with place and history: photographing the 40th parallel of latitude across the US at every whole degree of longitude. This new series, however, is based much closer to home and involves a different kind of location-based system—that of my childhood memories.

For “Markers: Memory,” I am returning to my hometown and exploring places with certain keen childhood memories, and considering the changes in the world and myself. Sometimes, the places are entirely changed; other times, they are remarkably the same. There are many markers and memorials on the land that delineate time and place, but these images use simple “life markers”: the spot where I caught my first fish, the woods where I first heard the word “hump,” the field where I got my first and last hit in little league, etc. Most are fairly benign memories, but some are bittersweet while others suggest childhood regret. As a result of this endeavor, new memories are being created and then overlaid onto older ones. Although the locations and memories are subjective to me, the feelings they conjure up I hope are fairly universal.

My time in the “happy valley” represents some of the best and the worst times of my life; many equally beautiful and tragic things happened here; and, as it always seems to be the case, they laid the foundation for events later in life. This project is in part is a way for me to contemplate and come to terms with my past and make amends with my family and myself today. I live in human time, and my more than 40 years means nothing to the land, yet everything to me. This project is also an attempt to reconcile this disparity in my consciousness using the precision and expanse of large format 8 x 10 panoramic photography, a technique normally reserved for 19th century surveys of the land. I hope by pursuing a more active relationship with what has been will allow for a more fluid relationship with the present and future.