The Retrospection series began with some flea market purchases. These visually intriguing objects, with their worn surfaces and suggestion of time past, just had to be photographed. I incorporated the idea of layering, which I had explored in previous work, by digitally compositing the images I had recorded. The results suggested to me the process of forming memories. Being a former teacher, cognitive processes have always fascinated me—how we understand our world, file this knowledge away, recall it, and integrate it with new knowledge.

This process of remembering seems a somewhat mysterious act of organization and reorganization. As we reconstruct an earlier experience, details come into focus, which we then attempt to arrange into a coherent whole. Some emerge as well-defined, while others remain vague. Elements successively fall into place, though never quite filling every gap. Through memory, we build an approximation of a past experience, effectively forging something new from something old.

These images are my attempts to create visual equivalents of this process. The vintage objects that appear suggest connections with the past. The final images are printed in layers of gum bichromate over a cyanotype base. The multiple gum bichromate layers, which incorporate watercolor pigments, add subtle color to the final images. This printing process mimics memory as multiple print exposures build up the final images.