When my mother asked me if she could donate or discard my old childhood toys, which still resided in her house, I told her to wait until I’d had a chance to photograph them. My intention was just to make a record of them, for sentimental reasons. But when I started to photograph the toys, I was struck by how emotionally distant they seemed to be.
I decided to capture that distance, and my new relationship to these artifacts from my past, in a serious photographic study I call Recollection. In order to do this, I felt I had to decontextualize the toys—to remove any reference to the original home environment in which I once knew them. I did this in the most extreme way I could think of, by photographing them against a pure black background. My intent is that this visual void represents both the physical and mental displacement between me and my toys caused by the many years that have passed since I played with them.