EXPERIENCING THE CENTURY
“History, memory, representation: the subjects together can be taken as absolute, and are often taught as such when fact memorization is prized over questioning. However, once questioned, history, memory, and representation go limp. They becoming these malleable, subjective concepts that can never be absolute.
"EXPERIENCING THE CENTURY” was birthed when, after having struggled with these ideas, I acquired a book titled “Century”. It is 1,000 pages of historical photographs of the 20th century are shown chronologically. Having only been 10 years old in the year 2000, all the the events in the book occurred before any of my own personal experience of current events. My reaction with the book was visceral. In it is photographic representation of mostly traumatic and brutal world events. How is one supposed to process, understand, and internalize these representations when one is so removed from the actual events? The collages are a challenge to a traditional story telling of history by taking photojournalistic representations and severely manipulating them, mixing their time lines and geographies to create new history that is both real and artificial.
