The memory is fragile
I’m afraid of closing my eyes once too many and blow away all my memories in one blink. I shoot and I forgot, I have stopped struggling.
These pictures are like a visit in deep parts of my memory, left in ruins. Here I show mental images.
It’s not about showing a precise moment or precise memory: it’s about showing how I forgot without filling the blanks. What matters most is not what I forgot, but how memory moves : how faces disappear and looks become rain drops.
Here nothing is certain, there are no limits anymore between imagination and memory.
I could give two starting points to this series. The first would be in early summer 2011 where I lost successively two men. An ex has overdosed, and my love of the moment was crushed in the parking lot of a village hall. This is the beginning of an accelerated forgetfulness process.
The second birth is in 2014, when I realized that I no longer had their image in memory. That’s when I started to photograph.
The goal is not to try to find their faces by doing portraits. The interest is not to freeze a specific moment, it is to show forgetting. It is the mechanism of erasure, of disappearance, which is important. [Official Website]
I practice an intimate and autobiographical photograph.I show myself from the inside. It’s a little like turning my body around like a glove. To see the imprint of the inner life on the hidden side of my skin. It is an excuse to tell what has no context elsewhere, which has no other place to exist than in my images.
Naoual Peleau
