Hippocampus Photography

8/14/17 10:29 AM

"Oh Yeah" -Foxygen, 2012

When you visualize your memory

Where is the camera?

Do you see yourself from above, in sweeping crane shots, or in vertigo zoom?

Or is the camera set in your eyes?

Taking POV shots of what you saw

ignoring everything else going on out of frame?

For me, the fondest memories are in third person

Tracking shots on the day I gave my first love poem to a girl

Crane shots on the day that very same girl made curry for me

Slow dolly zoom on the day that we sat on her back porch, smoking cigarettes to the sound of old new music I curated

A high angle shot of the day I came back from a Virginia Woolf moment at the lake to my roommates making pizza for all of us

The first person memories have an unsettling duality to them

Most are banal, making coffee yesterday and watching the news

Driving to work and seeing a woodchuck

But some of those shots are malicious, torrid images

Close up of the last moment I hit the tree, the camera of my memory looking down and unbuckling

Single shot sequence of the last moment I saw my godmother in her hospital bed, frail and fed by a tube

A hazy lap dissolve of the last moment of high school, when I had finally gotten to meet people who liked me and realizing that it would be over in weeks

Slowly, as time goes on the film editor in my brain makes re-cuts

Taking triumphs of dissociation and turning them into first person failures

On good days I find myself examining the cinematography as the film is being made

Making shot lists in my mind

Trying to Kubrick my way into a happy thought

When you shoot a scene in third person, you get context

You see both characters moving, both facial expressions

You can see what the world around them looks like

Their dialogue becomes a small part of an entire scene

Camera movement makes the viewer perceive quickness of tempo and the grandness of the horizon

For me, it's about analyzing my own perspective

Meta-theorizing my way into understanding