Dreams and Fantasy

There’s no such thing as photographing a dream. I have tried.

Within dreams I distinctly remember pointing my camera, but I never remember the image I make. I can’t dredge anything concrete from the fuzzy jumble of dreamed experience when awake. To me, dreams represent one end of a spectrum that extends from the unconscious process of dreaming into fully wakeful activity. I spent a significant amount of time as a child daydreaming and imagining a fanciful private world. Many of us experience visions that emerge from the subconscious at odd times, or inspirations triggered by a random association. Play is an embodiment of conscious and directed imagination that is too often neglected in our adult lives.

This terrain is the fertile in-between ground from whence comes the material for this series. Attempting to translate these fruits of imagination into photographic images is my form of play. The top of the bedroom dresser becomes a stage on which I assemble a parade of illusory scenes in miniature. In this world of make-believe, objects can fly, suspended on threads against backdrops of painted paper. As in dreams, nothing is real, and nothing is entirely serious. But the creative choices that make up each image are in fact manifestations of the subconscious. They come from the same mysterious and overlooked inner world that gives birth to dreams.