If I Die Before I Wake

"I must stop quickly and think of something else; I don't want to tire my memories. In vain; the next time I evoke them a good part will be congealed." Jean Paul Sartre - Nausea

When I dream of places I remember from the past, the scenes don’t match those in my memory. They are sometimes more vivid, sometimes more terrifying. When I try to pull images from my dreams, they slip away, or become confused with details already fixed in my memory. Photography can freeze and eternalize what would be fleeting moments in time. There is no mechanism for this in dreams. We rely on memory. If I Die Before I Wake is inspired by images that have moved across my consciousness in travels and in dreams. The project is influenced, as much by boring postcards and scrapbook clippings, as it is by the canonical and sometimes romanticized works of image-makers, and journalists of the past. But the places and moments represented in this project don’t exist. There is no way to photograph dreams.