I had the honor of helping guide my Father-In-Law through his Louie Body Dementia journey.  For almost 2 years we, as a family, cared for him in his home.  Prior to the onset of dementia, he was a force of nature and a natural communicator.  He could talk for hours about his business and his family.  He often would apologize for talking so much, saying that he got paid to talk, a reference to some of his consulting work where he was paid by the hour.

As I watched the progression of his disease, I noticed that the memories that he had shared that added so much dimension to his life story began to slip away from him.  He loved it when we would tell him the stories that he had forgotten.  It was a blessing that, to him, the loss of these memories didn’t cause him discomfort or anguish.  His typical reaction was joy and amazement that he had done something so significant.  We became the keepers of his memories.  As he came to the end of his dementia journey, his world was largely stripped of memories and solely focused on his basic needs.  

This process led me to think about my memories of the moments in my life that brought me joy and how fragile these were.  I have lived a good full life and I am blessed with solid memories of the big things, my family, career choices, my relationship with my partner, and the art that I have created.   I have recorded these stories in a book that my daughter Annie encouraged me to write a few years ago.

But I have come to realize that there are hundreds of smaller moments in my life that have added richness and depth to my days. Mostly, these are centered around interactions that I have with strangers that I meet. For the record, I don’t consider myself to be a particularly outgoing person.  I am quite happy being alone with myself.  But, I also have found that I really enjoy people, and especially using photography and writing to capture a moment, or an interaction, or a snippet of another person's life.

These moments always start for me with the photograph.  I see a person or a situation, and simultaneously, I can see a black and white photograph in my mind.  I know instantly that this is something I need to capture.  I have tried to explain what this feels like, but words seem to fall short for me.  The closest thing I can come up with is that it is far more than a compulsion to capture a moment or scene, it is more like the image grabs me by the guts and demands my attention.

I believe that these moments are far more susceptible to becoming lost memories because they are essentially disconnected from my life memories and stories. This in no way diminishes their value to me, but as non sequiturs they lack anchors to my life events.  This project is my attempt to record them as close to the moment of creation as possible.  They are an important part of me and how I see the world and are worthy of being kept.

All of these images are captured on film, using a variety of cameras, from 35mm to large format 4X5.  Film seems to be important to me, so much so that I wouldn’t even consider using a digital camera for any of them. On more than one occasion I have had to go home to retrieve my camera instead of just shooting with my cell phone.  As an example, when I met Mijodrag and Sonja, the Serbian crepe-making fortune tellers working in Denali, I had forgotten my camera at the lodge that we were staying at.  It was all downhill to our lodge, which of course meant that it was all uphill coming back, and it was almost an hour past their closing time.  But the thought of taking the photo with my cell phone never even entered my mind.

I think that this compulsion to use film is related to memory, and more specifically to the recording of memory.  Film leaves a tangible artifact in the form of a negative.  It is a physical representation of the moment and the memory.  Digital images are stored in the form of ones and zeros on a hard drive somewhere.  If these images are records of memories, then they are just as fragile as the ones stored in the gray matter between our ears.  A crashed hard drive is like digital dementia.  If my goal is to record my memories, it doesn’t make much sense to use such fragile storage media.

In the end, this project is very personal, and I hope that I will continue to be able to cherish these memories for a long time.  But, it also moves past the personal.  In order to feel compelled to meet new people I have to believe that people are fundamentally good, interesting, and worthy.  These images and stories are a direct reflection of my core belief in the goodness of humanity.  I hope that they will also serve as a record of the rich diversity found in these bags of chemicals we call humans.