LensCulture Editor Review

Toward Amnesia This project comes out of a painful transition from oneness with another to a state of involuntary separateness. It is about the end of a relationship, of loss and grief. I am on a journey of willing myself to forget the pain and accept my own separateness. At times, I feel that all the air has been forced from my lungs. I want amnesia to wash over me, suddenly flood me and separate my self from the past. I want to create an amnesia of sorts in an effort to escape form painful memories. The Oxford Medical Dictionary states that “most cases of amnesia result from insult to the Central Nervous System and cause partial or complete memory loss without impairment of other functions.” I began this project by trying to create a temporary amnesia through submersion in cold water. I want to forget and fill myself with entirely new memories that will be utterly unrelated to the past and to its gravitational pull on me. The project focuses on images of myself, my son and close family. It's about connection and separateness, physical space and psychological space. A conceptual truth emerges. I am not bound to anything or anyone, that none of us is, really; we are separate. We come from oblivion and go back to oblivion. Maybe we are all pulling toward amnesia. We long for connection, but we are separate and in that, we find our wholeness. These portraits speak to the physical and psychological spaces that we inhabit simultaneously. They are a documentation of a personal journey, but one that is universal to human experience.