After a burst of inspiration and activity in the last 48 hours I think I’m nearly there with this one. This post doesn’t represent the final version to be submitted to my tutor, rather it is a version that I’m happy to share with student peers for review and comment before I commit it to print.

It has a working title of ‘oh hang on’.

Self evaluation to follow.

EDIT: second draft here.

About the work

“When one glove is missing, both are lost”
(Roger McGough 2000)

Losing a glove is, in a small way, a peculiarly disorienting experience. You lose something that leaves behind its mirror image to remind you of the loss.

Seeing items that other people have left behind in public reminds me of my own memory lapses over the years (well, the ones I can remember, anyway).

I’d already been collecting photos of lost gloves for a few years when I started investigating aspects of memory as part of my photographic practice. I’m particularly interested in the unreliability of human memory. The two threads became connected in my mind. Everybody loses something every day, though usually just a memory, and it’s usually unimportant. Usually.

Evidence of other people’s lapses of attention or memory reassures me that I’m not alone in my absent-mindedness; at the same time, it triggers an oddly symmetrical train of thought about remembering forgetting.

With these images I want to capture a middle-aged sense of realising that you’ve forgotten something: a fleeting moment of panic followed by the nagging sense that this forgetfulness might be symptomatic of slowly losing your faculties.

The physical presentation format is a book dummy, so this set begins with a cover image. The main images in the series are presented here in horizontal format to emulate a double-page spread.

Click on the first image to see a bigger slideshow version – better for reading the text.

oh hang on