We Have To Talk

(Untitled #01, The Untitled Collaboration of Brendan George Ko and faye mullen, 30x40" c-print, 2008)

Today I had a really good talk with a friend about the document of photography. How it is a challenge to see a photograph as a true representation of the moment. How we struggle over and over, again and again with a new challenge for each fold of repetition to preserve a moment. I have become obsessed with the documentation of my life, not in the sense of representation of my existence but rather the existence of others. There have been so many people in my life that hold a permenance within me, that have changed the fabric of me by their influence, and I am held humble to have knowing them, but also to have been graced by their presence. Maybe I am too honorable, perhaps even hopelessly devoted, but I want to remember certain details of my life forever; passing my lifetime, and beyond as the memory of those I have known are encapsulated behind the layer of film. This layer presents the end of tangibility of change to happen as we look at the photograph's stillness, and it is this layer that preserves the moment from the erosive nature of time. And in time, even those memories will fall to nature as they decay like my own memory; as a childhood is forgotten to a new age. It is in this repetition of representation, of those I have known and the places I have been, that my history is remembered. Leaving my ideas of an artist behind, I see only a camera as a form of utility; a reflex of my desire to remember, as everything in-between shifts the focus of who I truly am, and my passions, making me into something else. What can the image of our past say once we are gone? Does it matter, once we stop, we are only photographs; captured memories. A truthful portrayal is death, as the moments that happen in-between the frame, moments uncaptured by silver, are what continues once we are shadows, and in a sense, we live, eternally, as unspoken mysteries to the world we leave behind.