The Tamesis
How do you choose the actors to work with?
I wanted to feel the presence of the person I lost as deeply as possible while also returning to the myself that loved him. We need to embody the two people I remember. I worked with a casting director to find someone who could live the story with me, someone who could help me relive the story.
What does it feel like to have such a personal memory replayed with an unknown body and person?
Very painful. I don’t want to go through it again and lose him completely. The hardest part is knowing how it will end and choosing to live through it again.
Aren’t you afraid of being far away from those memories, afraid of losing your intimate connection with them?
Those memories are gone from me and that’s where the inspiration for this project came from. They no longer exist as they once did; they have been covered. To some extent, this distance already exists. The process becomes a way of reclaiming them, existing a little longer in the story before saying goodbye.
Writer Alice Notley says writing is not therapy and she still carries her grief. Is this the same for you with photography?
Art gave me a language to process and feel. Part of me wanted to speed up the process, but that wasn’t the case. I felt this deeply in my previous work: how much I wanted to let go of the story, not want to be defined by it, and it only became possible when I was truly ready.
