The Landscape of Memory
These were my thoughts as I created the series, memories of place in the absence of image
REVELATIONS ON THE BEACH (Rhode Island)
Soon after we met, Tom took me to his childhood beach in Rhode Island. It was a frozen February day, the seagulls held in place by the wind. He showed me the rock where he’d had his first kiss. And the pine where he and his father had talked—long and late, about life, etc.—shortly before he left for college. He loved that beach–knew it by heart. Somewhere in the cloud there’s a selfie of us—blue lips, big smiles. But in my memory, I’m not even there. It’s just Tom, as a boy, collecting rocks on a windswept beach.
THE GHOST MOUNTAINS OF MARFA II (West Texas)
In Marfa, the desert gives way to a sky so vast, you can see the ghosts of distant mountains. The art at Chinati feels carved from the land—monumental, weathered, fixed as the rock. When I lost the photos, I tried to remember the color of the sand. Some days it’s coral. Other days, it’s a sunburned brown. The landscape changes with my mood. What the eyes can’t recall, the memory colors.
TWILIGHT ON THE GLACIER (Iceland)
I once spent the day on a glacier in Iceland. It was January—permanent midnight—and the sky at its brightest was a nocturnal blue. I remember the way it reflected off the ice fields, the air so cold it froze all sound. And you felt like you were floating. Spoken words didn’t linger. They just vanished—nothing to bounce off, nowhere to land. The pictures I took live adrift in the cloud, light and thin as ice on an eyelash, lost like my words in that icy expanse.
MISSED YOU AT THE HOT SPRINGS (Taos, NM))
It was pitch black when we arrived at the hot springs, the desert barely lit by stars. I stayed in the car with my sister while two bold friends wandered into the dark. We cranked the radio up high. But I remember the shame more than the music—that I’d been too afraid to get with them. And on the way back, there was a blood orange sunrise—the embers breaking over black hills. I didn’t get to see the hot springs. But I imagine the water as a mineral blue, steam rising off its thermal stillness.
REMEMBER ME IN CORNWALL (U.K.)
When I was eight, we moved to the UK for the year and spent the weekends on ferries and coastal roads, exploring—Arran, Shetland, Wight and Skye. I remember Cornwall best: matching sweaters, fish and chips, getting stuck behind a herd of grazing sheep—while my parents just turned off the engine and waited. There was so much green, verdant but muted—loden, moss and olive-gray. And at night, the water and sky turned the same shade of ink. The photos are gone. But I can almost touch the memory.