Mikael Phoenix

Two memories from my childhood have remained etched in my mind: witnessing the death of my grandfather, alone, at the age of six, and the vision of a dark figure looking in through a window late at night. One memory stands as a stark reality; the other has faded into a dreamlike uncertainty. My recollections layer upon each other like multiple exposures in a photograph, becoming more obscure as time passes. This series of photographs is a dive into imagery that may be a dream rather than a true memory. It is a dive into the fears I had as a child and persist in new forms. Fears like the darkness of the deep ocean, the end of the stairs and what might be waiting, or an empty space with no idea what might be lurking around a corner or in a window. Tension in the out of place, the unseen, and what might just become the uncanny is central to this series where I employ not a literal representational style, but rather an expressionistic one capturing a feeling and a mood using black and white photography. 

Development and editing were done with my concept in mind and I developed the photographs to evoke a feeling rather than simply what was there. I wanted to evoke what wasn’t there; what I felt in what I saw and what I created in the frame. Blur and intentional camera movement are used significantly in the series to show not just movement, but literal transformation from one moment in time to the next, and the decay of memory with each of those passing moments. When you view these photographs, you are viewing a dream, a nightmare, captured in the frame. You will find not only echoes of my own dreams and nightmares, but a mirror to your own; a reflection worn away by time of our deepest fears and memories.