03.04.08

Untitled (Suzie Hedge), 2006
by Brandon Herman

A confused nostalgia drives my work. I am only 24 and already I have trouble recalling my childhood with any certainty. I feel an intense longing, which is partly focused on actual moments from my early youth, but I also remember things that I have never even experienced because they are a part of a childhood I was shown in movies. Looking back I have trouble separating the real from the imagined. I felt the natural range of human emotions in the face of actual occurrences of significance, but mainstream media influences could draw from me reactions of equal intensity. A duality developed, each half occupying the same importance in my emotional being, each half affected by the other. A relationship in my life would be intensified, understood, and confused by a song. A movie would shed light on an experience not yet had, providing hope and expectation. An experience would not live up to a movie, causing disappointment. The push and pull was constant. The relationship was symbiotic.

Part of what I long for in my childhood is what actually happened, part of it is what I imagined would happen. I long for the simplicity of not understanding the difference between reality and fantasy, not ever thinking about it. I miss the time when anything was possible. The imagination of a child is limitless.

I have no idea why certain images from my childhood stuck with me, but the randomness and the lack of logic enrich the hunt. Rembrandt paintings remind me of paintings my grandparents had in their house where my brother and I would be dropped of on weekends when my parents would go out of town. Why did I take note of those and not a hundred other decorations that adorned their house? Lines in songs and characters in movies tantalize and elude me in the same way. All I can do is search for them instinctually, only knowing that I have found them when I feel that fleeting satisfaction, having been transported back momentarily.

I snap the shutter because whatever is caught can be kept forever. The task never ends because I am trying to keep something that has already been lost forever in many ways. My memory is unreliable, even now, at my relatively young age. And it will only get worse. My camera is a jar in which I am trying to catch fire-flies, wanting to always be able to enjoy their light.

I am energized by the confusion, the inconsistencies. Movies are nothing like real life. But sometimes they are. Sometimes life is like a movie. Sometimes a movie helps you live life, helps you feel it. In many ways the characters in my photos are living the life I imagined back then that I would be living now. In many ways they too are confused, part cinema and part real, sometimes too beautiful to live, sometimes too sad to be made-up. Nudity and nature represent naivety and innocence, being on the brink of discovery.

I've been to all of these places before, either in person or in my mind. Now I just have to recreate it all. My subjects are all my own age, because in childhood you never think outside of your own age. Even when you imagine yourself as an archaeologist one day in the future, you don't envision yourself as any older than you are that day in third grade. So here I am, part 24, part seven, trying to make a place where I can live in this liminal state forever, my own Peter Pan to my own Lost Boys.