index language memory representation uncanny
As I move through a city, particularly one I think I know well, I am struck by how suddenly I encounter a sense of déjà vu, that intangible feeling of recognition and strangeness. It is a sense of the uncanny, the resurfacing of a forgotten memory carefully tucked away by our unconscious until triggered by some familiar element in an unusual setting: a discarded child’s toy, a nostalgic tone of light, a moment of stillness where there is normally commotion. The photographs shown here were taken at such moments throughout Toronto, in places that have similarly been tucked away from public memory, whether for an hour or for years. I didn’t grow up in Toronto, but in these places I found myself briefly and sometimes cryptically transported into a space from my past. I raised my camera and took a picture, hoping it would capture this feeling I couldn’t quite name. The information conveyed through a photograph uses one of our most primal and universal forms of understanding: sight. John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing , ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.’ 1 With a similar observation, Jacques Lacan notes that as we learn to move from seeing (the realm of the imaginary) to speaking (the symbolic realm) something is lost in translation. Lacan terms what is left behind, the real . We sense this loss though we cannot describe it, struggling through graphic or written forms of expression, but rarely able to say all that we feel. 2
perception | recognition by jessica craig
portraits of memory je ne sais quoi
1 John Berger. Ways of Seeing . London: Penguin, 2008. p7 2 Dylan Evans. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis . New York: Routledge, 1996
On Saturday afternoons when humidity made doing anything too much to bear, we laid on the dock: sometimes on our stomachs, mesmerised by an undulating jellyfish, sometimes propped up to look out to the horizon, gauging the weight of the ocean in silence. I admired my grandmother’s hands: elegantly manicured with golden diamond rings, capable of the most intricate crafts. Behind every stucco wall, for an instant, I felt she might be waiting.
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Though she lived in the heart of the city, her home was only accessible via several flights of stairs, which transformed into waterfalls when it rained.
Jessica Craig
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