The Curve of Reminiscence

My first summer fair was a carnival encampment at the edge of a prairie town in central Illinois. I was ten and it was the same year I got my first camera. Words cannot adequately express the thrill of a first roller coaster ride, and the images in my film camera did not turn out. Several years ago, I started an ongoing project to recapture those early images from summer fairs across the American Midwest. I expected the romanticized fair of my youth. What confronted me was commercialization, gluttony and heavy crowds in pursuit of some American dream. In seeking these images, I find myself conflicted whether to veer into nostalgia or toward the ripe exploitation of contemporary revelry. All of our lives are chaotic. The summer fair serves up refreshment like few other venues in life, whether we are running from the chaos or heading into it. Albert Camus wrote about the invincible summer in his lyrical essay “Return to Tipasa.” He journeys back to the place of his youth and the changes he finds there disappoint him. Memory can be crafty. When you create a memory molecule, you are a different person than the one who will recall it later. My pictures struggle with this choice and the muse of memory. There is “no eternity outside the curve of days . . . only truths the hand can touch.” If I saw the lost images from my first camera, I wonder if I would recognize them and whether these new images are a rediscovery of those or a fresh discovery of something else.