I am here.
To grip your fleeting memories: autobiographical photography proving your existence in time that ceases to exist.
Culture has become oversaturated with works of art and literature, but autobiographical photography and poetry are personal mediums that continue to expose the artist authentically. In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer, a photographer and poet, combined her two passions to create a conceptual art piece titled Memory. For the creation of the project, she shot an entire roll of 35mm film each day, pairing it with a detailed journal of her experiences and emotions of that particular day. She accumulated over a thousand pictures and a month's worth of written reflections on her so-called ordinary life. Some may see Memory as a photo album of her life, but in the name of conceptual art, Bernadette used Memory to prove and assert her presence. Make her existence intimately known.
During this time, female artists were invisible; society and culture dismissed the overall female experience. By combining her photography and writing abilities, physical life, and the art world, she challenges the duality between the concepts of the past and present, memory and identity, presence and absence. Mayer relocated the objective truth of the present by placing herself as the subject and observer of her own life.
Juxtaposing the traditional forms of photography (to capture images or moments for the beauty, the aesthetic, and desired moments), as a conceptual artist, the documentation aspect of photography held a greater significance.
Autobiographical photography captures the state in which society’s political implications function at that given time—the hierarchical structures that suppress women, both through life and art, deciding what is worth preserving. In Lindsay Garbutt’s Everyday Life, Revisited—with Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, she notes, Mayer’s work “blurs the boundary between art and life.” Mayer utilizes this art form to manipulate our conventional understanding of time; inherently displaying a moment of the past which is always viewed by the present self, in turn continuously making the past feel like the present.
Memory acted as a way for her to present her lived experiences, the raw and mundane moments, as an intimate testament to her presence. Mayer uses photography and words to serve as a visual means of saying “I was here.”, synonymous with the graffiti plastered on the bathroom walls (although hers is much more endearing). Her photographs transform the fleeting moments of her everyday life into a tangible form that manipulates how our memories reside within us, blurring the line between the past and the present. Through the combination of images and text, Mayer’s ability to capture the intimate moments of her life challenges the omission of our memories and identity through time.
As Mayer captures her life in the past and reviews it in the present, she is now reliving said experience through the lens of her new ego. Each photo acts as a time capsule, but every time it is revisited the content inside gets reshaped. Mayer manipulated linear time by creating a rolling cycle of reconceptualizing your past existence with the current version of yourself, which you will then reconceptualize again with the future version of yourself that is unknown for the time being. It is an ongoing dialogue between past and present.
The decision not to document a moment means submitting to the risk of forgetting, even moments we expect to remain permanent and potent in our minds. Mayer used her camera and a pen to combat the risk of fleeting moments slipping into oblivion. Mayer is resisting the hierarchy of the art world by making the executive decision on what is worthy of being remembered.
Mayer transports the present self to a moment captured by light; she generously supplies her journal excerpts to narrate her internal dialogue by taking habitual experiences and making them extraordinary. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; Mayer’s photography and written text provide more words than one can comprehend. She places us into her consciousness at each given moment, making the emotional connection to her past experiences stronger.
Memory into an autobiography that captures the intricacy of understanding one's immortalized existence. The text she provides mimics the raw, unfiltered, and scattered essence of the memories themselves, magnifying the significance of the beauty within the mundane. The text encapsulates the experiences she captures, while simultaneously complicating them by saturating the photographs with emotional ambiguity.
When the artist has the ability to manipulate their presence to later critique from a new perspective, it becomes a representation of how society questions the construction of the individual. Mayer exhibits the urge to preserve the humanistic character, ensuring that the simplicity of the individual experience does not disintegrate in the face of dismissive behavior.
Mayer’s project ultimately exists as a medium to preserve the self; she not only provides the physically visible experiences of her life but also the emotional journeys each version of herself has traveled through. She allows us to see her move through desire and lust, exhaustion and mania, and moments of joy and solitude. The fiercly protected phases of her life and versions of herself persevere through the detachment of a given moment's emotions. She takes away the option of omission.
Bernadette Mayer and others, such as ourselves, use memoiristic photographs to “anchor identity to visible evidence,” regardless of the ever-fleeting meanings we attach to a photo (Rugg, 1997). Mayer does not use Memory as a means of reconstructing past versions of yourself, but rather as a method of self-reflexivity in hopes of future change; space for the viewer and the artist to return to the subject's past (the artist) and offer a new perspective.
Memory acts as a living archive of Bernadette Mayer’s life. It extends beyond a photographic diary to reach a level of affirmative existence, stubbornly avoiding the disintegration into the void, the timeline of the past. Her work displays her permanence in the past, stating “I was here,” presenting the opportunity to revisit her inscription as her current self and all the future versions she gets the privilege of being. Mayer turns her private, raw, and authentic life into a piece of art that is ready to receive the convictions of others. Mayer can reconstruct the discourse of an individual's life; regardless of how mundane or trivial an experience may seem, it is still worthy of being remembered.
Autobiographical photography acts as a testimony to one's existence; it simultaneously begs and forces the public to witness their life, which otherwise would've gone unnoticed. It forces the past to stay present, continuously moving into the future.
May 2025