Imaginalia Volume I: Once Upon A Time
Photographic stories from the imaginal realm
This project began with an impulse to delete thousands of my photographs.
I have always been a collector and curator of things. Stones and seed pods picked up on walks and arranged in small shrines on my windowsill. Vintage dresses, found in the backrooms of antique shops – clothes that carry the memories of those who wore them, costumes for dramas to come. Cabinets stuffed with old shoeboxes of life’s memorabilia: letters, children’s drawings, odd little keepsakes whose provenance only I will ever understand.
And, of course: photographs.
This is how many of us collect and store the fragments of our lives. In the digital age it is easy to accumulate thousands—sometimes hundreds of thousands—of images, only to discover that we rarely look at them again, let alone print or curate them in any meaningful way.
But the impulse to clear some of my own image hoard led me to look at what I had accumulated in a new way. Contained within the thousands of thumbnails were tiny worlds.
Some of these I had created deliberately, during an intense period of creative experimentation, many years ago. Others were created by nature, or by accidental juxtaposition. Zooming in, I became lost in the potential connections, until slowly, stories began to emerge.
What started as an attempt to delete old photographs became a process of rediscovering, cataloguing and reimagining this personal collection, until the treasures contained within it formed into a world of its own: the Imaginalia Archive.
Once Upon A Time is the first collection of photographic stories from the Imaginalia Archive.
Assembled entirely from my original photographs, these stories and portraits exist somewhere between memory, folklore and dream – windows into an imaginal realm.
They are at once familiar and utterly strange.
Some unfold across several pages.
Others are suggested within a single portrait, or through relationships between images.
No tale is told completely.
Like folklore, each asks to be interpreted, remembered and retold.