Other Voices

«Ideas are substitutes for sorrows; when the latter change into ideas they lose part of their noxious action on our hearts and even at the first instant their very transformation disengages a feeling of joy.» – Finding Time Again, Marcel Proust

It is said in Neuroscience that memory is not stored in the brain, but the brain itself is a memory, and time is understood by brain cells and synapses. In addition, memory updates our brain every day, and while our brain rewriting our memories, we stock various images in our brain. In other words, the act of looking at a photograph is the act of understanding what has been “remembered” by resonating with other images in our brain.

In this project, for the purpose of exploring the connection between record and memory, I used photographs that I could not print because of my painful memories. The record of that specific time captured in those photos was so vivid and I was searching for a way to be released from the wounds that brought me to. That is when I found the solution in Marcel Proust’s books; “create a new memory by rewriting these painful records”.

As a process,

1) I scanned the negatives and printed them.

2) I shot the printed pictures with a polaroid camera.

3) I scanned the pictures I shot with a polaroid camera and then print them again.

4) I shot them with the polaroid camera again.

I repeated this method 10 times.

The original image was newly framed each time by copying with a Polaroid camera, and a reflection of a glossy paper created a layer of the reproduced time and slowly rewritten the original record. And with the use of expired polaroid films, technical errors such as undeveloped and developer leaks added accidental elements each time. In addition, 3-minutes of developing time extended 30 minutes of the original time by repeating the process for 10 times. Now, the image exists in other rooms, other times…

From this process, I was looking for an answer to the question, “If the photo is strongly linked to personal memory, is it possible to rewrite the personal memory by reproducing the record?”

(Now that all Polaroids produced at this time have lost, the process exists only in my memory, and sometimes the imagination fulfills the disappearance.)