COVID: Dreaming
Since the start of the pandemic, I have been keeping a journal full of fears, hopes, and the dreams that haunt me at night. As COVID-19 raged on, my dreams became vivid nightmares that I could not shake, even hours after waking. Documenting these dreams helped me separate reality from imagination. The more I would write, the easier it got to remember the dreams in detail. Some were funny, others were very scary, but there were themes that would start to emerge that thread through them all; themes of shame, loss, fear, escapism, and most of all hope.
I started photographing the settings of my dreams, an abandoned movie theater here, an empty amusement park there. But the more I got into this project, the more I realized that the photos I already had from years of photography were perfect backdrops to my dreams, or rather I had been dreaming of the images I had already seen.
My photographs are printed on the highest quality Baryta Rag, framed, then I used a wax pencil to write the dream directly on top of the glass. The text is my handwriting, looking just as does when it moves from my mind onto the pages of my journal. The finished text is just like a dream, not meant to last, but to linger and fade slowly over time so that all that is left is the memory of the image.
