Memory Fog

Memory Fog
446 pages
Introduction essay by Zane Perdue and additional text by Rachelle Sabourin
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Memory Fog started as four books covering thousands of miles through the Atlantic region in the fall and winter of 2024. Each volume is divided by production method: through the windshield, on foot, with the “drive-by device,” and through Google Maps.

The project began as an attempt to expand my archive of the “world as is” while trying to make sense of the nagging déjà vu I feel on every back road, passing abandoned buildings and places I could swear I’ve seen before. The photographs accumulate as a kind of amnesiac road trip: places repeat, methods repeat, and documentation gradually becomes difficult to separate from memory. Who knows.

The four books were part of a larger project to create an extensive archive of “democratic” images, treating Memory Fog almost as a byproduct of the process itself. The complete work runs 436 pages across four volumes – the first run of which were done in color.

A box-set edition of 13 included all four books, an 8 × 10 print made from an MRI scan of my brain, and an envelope of twenty-four 4 × 6 photographs.

Several secondary editions followed: Completely Repeated, which compiled the four volumes into a single book; a black-and-white book-fair edition; and a somewhat shorter colour edition of CR. Each was produced in fewer than 100 copies. For CR, I was thinking about Ari Marcopoulos’s Directory: a big, Xerox-y tome, something deliberately excessive and burdensome for the bookshelf.

Copies travelled to book fairs from Jersey to Japan and just as many were donated to libraries and collections for reference. Portions of Memory Fog were later reproduced in Discordia Review’s Fellow Travellers, and Volume I was shortlisted for the Photo Zine Awards at Peckham 24 Photography Festival in London. This project was made possible with the generous support of ArtsNB, without whom this project simply could not have been realized. I cannot understand my appreciation.