Forgetfulness
(excerpt)
This book is the product of several years of photographs taken (almost all in Phoenix, Arizona) during the night. While I was capturing the photographs, I don’t think I had a “project” in mind. What is seen here is an ex post facto collection of images I thought might be appropriate for the theme of this volume.
As for the title, my friend Emily helped me with that. When I told her of my book project, she sent me a poem by Sylvia Path, titled The Night Dances. While I didn’t quite want “night” to be in the title, I did find the word “forgetfulness” in the poem and thought it sufficiently allusive and mysterious for the name of this book.
James Elkins, in his book What Photography Is, writes “The third subject is photography’s way of capturing the world. Writers who care about this meditate on how photography provides us with memories, how it preserves the past, how it seems real, how it captures time, how it shows us other people’s lives. For these writers, many of them philosophers, photography is centrally about representation, time, memory, duration, presence, love, loss, mourning, and nostalgia.” *
—Joseph Podlesnik
* Elkins, James. What Photography Is. New York: Routledge, 2011. p viii, Preface