Memory binds us to place in ways that are both invisible and deeply felt. The landscapes and buildings of our childhoods carry more than bricks, fields, and boundaries; they carry the sediment of our lives. They are where we first learned to belong, where we played with friends, where conflicts took shape, where we sought shelter. These places may fade from sight as years pass, but they remain active within us, shaping our emotions, decisions, and sense of self long after we leave them.
When we “travel to the land of motionless childhood,”i we are never arriving at neutral ground. Our return is clouded by the layers of thought, emotion, and association that time has gathered. In memory, a house or a field becomes more than its walls or soil; it becomes a vessel of feeling. Yet when we stand there again, as adults, those remembered places rarely align with what stands before us. The tension between memory and present reality unsettles us, but it also opens a space of recognition.
When Echoes began, the intention was not to reconstruct or idealise these sites, but to encounter them directly — as they exist now. Returning to the houses, streets, and landscapes that had imprinted themselves on my early life, and photographed them without intervention.No matter how altered, neglected, or unrecognisable they had become, they were allowed to stand in their present form. In this way, the work holds both the persistence of memory and the reality of change in a single frame.
Each photograph is therefore both a document and a mirror. It is a document because it records “a discrete parcel of time,”ii a moment when light fell on form and was made real in the field of awareness. But it is also a mirror of something more elusive: the way memory alters perception, the way the past lingers in the present, the way change itself becomes a kind of presence. These images do not attempt to preserve childhood as it was; instead, they bear witness to how the places of childhood continue to shape us as adults.
In this sense, Echoes is not only personal, but universal. Each of us carries a private geography of memory — streets, rooms, or corners that live within us even when they have long since changed. To stand before them again is to confront both the tenderness of remembrance and the inevitability of impermanence. The photographs hold that paradox: they are postcards from a collective past, yet firmly rooted in the reality of now.
They are also, in their way, esoteric. Approached openly, these images can act like a Koan,iii unfolding in layers, revealing new insights as awareness deepens. What at first seems ordinary may shift into something strange or unsettling, then into something tender or luminous. This process mirrors memory itself: not fixed, but continually evolving, never quite finished.
In this way, Echoes is not about nostalgia, but about recognition. It acknowledges that places change, that people change, and that memory itself changes. What remains is not a fixed image of the past, but the continual dialogue between what once was and what is. Through the camera, these sites become not just records of external landscapes, but maps of an inner one — reminding us that memory is never still, but always alive.
i The Poetics of Space by Gaston Blachelard
ii Swarowski – Basic Critical Theory for Photographers by Ashley la Grange
iii A Koan is a riddle or puzzle that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves
