Temporal Distance, Spatial Logic: Photography’s Relationship to Memory

Tracing paths

Returning to my birthplace, Warsaw, in early 2024 prompted reflection on the interplay between personal narratives and broader historical currents. Gratitude emerges when considering how my artistic practice, and much of my life since 1987, has unfolded on unceded, sovereign lands in Australia, including Awabakal, Bidjigal, Gadigal, and Worimi Country. Recognizing this context foregrounds the complexity of migrant perspectives, especially when grappling with themes of place, memory, and material culture. Acknowledging these layered histories shapes an ongoing inquiry into how found images – photo albums – fragments, and objects can serve as conduits for questioning identity and displacement, and ultimately the role of photography, or the image in my practice.

A significant strand in this inquiry stems from personal experience: born in Warsaw in 1979, departing Poland for Germany on my sixth birthday in 1986, and arriving in Sydney in 1987. Emigration at a formative age brought about a distinct awareness of absence and presence, especially when revisiting the choices of what accompanied the journey – most notably, a new credenza purchased by my mother and dispatched by shipping container. The credenza assumed an almost mythic status: a functional piece of furniture bearing traces of Polish life, soon to reside in an Australian home still in formation. It arrived carrying the weight of memory and the promise of continuity in unfamiliar terrain. Its significance was not merely practical but also symbolic, illustrating how personal objects might become vessels of longing and cultural identity.

Nostalgia is often read as a yearning for a place or time no longer within reach. The credenza crystallized a form of nostalgia seeking to bridge the gap between an “old place” and a “new home.” Cultural theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Lucy Lippard, Doreen Massey, and Nikos Papastergiadis have noted how migration redefines conceptions of home by placing them in flux – and in a way turning it into an ever-evolving intersection of trajectories. For a migrant shipping a credenza across the world, this duality becomes concrete. The object asserts a desire for stability while also signifying the intangible nature of what has been left behind.

Gleaning as poetic scavenging

The practice of collecting and repurposing materials is a central thread in navigating questions of place and belonging. For me, the concept of gleaning – originally denoting the act of gathering remnants left after a harvest – resonates as an artistic approach. It suggests retrieving cultural detritus, discarded images, or personal ephemera. In Western art history, gleaning is famously portrayed in Jean-François Millet’s 1857 painting The Gleaners, where peasant women gather overlooked grains from a field. More recently, Agnès Varda’s 2000 film The Gleaners and I situates gleaning in a modern context, depicting those who salvage out of necessity or curiosity, and revealing a poetic potential in the rejected or forgotten.

In my mind, this approach differs from appropriation, which often critiques consumer culture by reframing existing images. Gleaning foregrounds chance encounters and direct material engagement. Much of it happens in flea markets, garage sales, and second-hand bookstores, where items that once held personal or commercial value are severed from their contexts. In my mind, that sense of dislodgment parallels a migrant’s experience: just as a photograph can be separated from its album, individuals can become unmoored from place. The gleaner embraces these remnants, recognizing latent histories and attachments. Through gleaning, meaning is reconfigured, suggesting a kinship between artistic practice and the social histories that shaped the discarded materials.

Albums as choreographies of looking

Among the objects gleaned in second-hand spaces, albums frequently appear. An album is more than a convenient repository: it is a performative device that structures how images are accessed and remembered. Martha Langford, in her book Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums,¹ explores the notion of photo albums as performing narratives, and revealing their functions as conversation pieces and memory repositories. Albums choreograph the viewer’s experience, page by page, making the act of looking physically interactive and relatively private.

Geoffrey Batchen² highlights the intimacy of this interaction, noting how an album is handled rather than simply viewed on a wall. The photographs move each time a page is turned, reactivated by touch. Albums thus carry an embodied process of remembering and, equally, of forgetting. Historical or familial albums often reveal the layered residues of repeated viewings across generations.

My project titled Every even page from a nineteenth century photo album (2014) emerged after encountering an old album at a garage sale in Sydney. Missing the original photographs, the album displayed ornate frames and painterly motifs. Decorative palms, columns, and scenic vistas encased empty windows where portraits might once have been. Signs of wear – frayed corners, foxing, and discoloration – hinted at past handling and storage. In the studio, I went about photographing each even-numbered page in reverse sequence, trying to unsettle the album’s narrative and emphasize its vacated spaces. Elizabeth Edwards,³ writing on the materiality of images, points to how albums lose much of their function without the photographs that once animated them. In this work, I intend for the absence of photographs to underscore the fragility of personal stories and hint at a broader meditation on displaced or forgotten histories.

Taken on the same day as the other photo

A small, seemingly insignificant image I discovered in a second-hand store offers another example of gleaning’s potential. The photograph depicts four men hiking up a steep slope, their backs to the camera, ascending into an overexposed haze. Underexposed stones in the foreground deepen the sense of mystery. On the reverse, a handwritten note reads: “Taken on the same day as the other photo, Mt. Bagana again.”

At first, the casual tone of the note overshadowed any geographical detail. Over time, it revealed Mt. Bagana as an active volcano on Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea – a site marked by eruptions and a difficult colonial history involving mining and resource extraction. This single image, severed from its original context and presumably part of a larger set, signaled expansive narratives that surpass the boundaries of the photographic frame. The men’s oblivious upward climb contrasts with the region’s layered past, raising questions about who took the picture, why it was discarded, and how many related images remain elsewhere. Such found photographs act as portals, directing attention to broader histories that persist beneath surface details. In a diasporic reading, they echo the incomplete timelines and scattered vantage points that shape personal and collective memory.

Shadowing

Several years later, I began making work by deconstructing reference books, including Reader’s Digest Scenic Wonders of the World (1981). These glossy, large-format publications gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, aligned with the rise of an aspirational middle class eager to explore the globe. They offered photographic showcases of landscapes and natural marvels, distributing visually stunning vistas that often felt detached from any historical or cultural context. The uncritical celebration of nature’s splendor served a late-capitalist appetite for travel and consumption, flattening unique geographies into a homogenized parade of postcards.

The series of works that comprise Shadowing (2023–2024) take scissors to this pre-packaged vision. I cut pages and rearranged them into collages, using templates adapted from technical drawing manuals for engineering students. These geometric cuts fragment the original images, causing sky, land, and water to converge in disorienting ways. Some collages display literal curls of cut paper pulling away from the support, creating shadows that highlight the physical violence inherent in the collage process. By unsettling the spatial coherence of “scenic wonders,” these works aim to question the power dynamics and reductive views encoded in mass-produced travel imagery. The result attempts to confront the assumed neutrality of the reference book with an invitation to reassess the narratives embedded in such popular forms of visual knowledge.

Extraction

Every even page from a nineteenth century photo album and Shadowing share a preoccupation with fragmentation and reassembly. In the former, the absence of personal images directs attention to the album’s deteriorating pages, vestiges of a narrative once anchored by portraits. In the latter, forcibly splicing reference book pages disturbs a curated view of global travel. Both projects probe how photographic contexts – albums, coffee-table books – might construct particular ways of seeing and remembering. Images that once supported coherent stories (a family chronology, a world atlas of scenic wonders) become sites of questioning when their structure is disrupted.

I feel that the process of gleaning and collage is particularly generative in diasporic contexts, where fragments of past and present cultures, languages, and traditions coexist in tension. Albums, whether intact or disassembled, reflect this struggle to contain time and space. Reference books, similarly, reveal biases in how the world is categorized for consumption. Combining or undoing these forms highlights the provisional nature of memory: pages can be ripped out, pictures can fade, margins can become sites for new inscriptions.

Embodied encounters

Fieldworking – engaging in site-responsive, embodied and intuitive modes of research, gathering objects, visiting archives – underpins my practices of gleaning and collage. Living on unceded lands in Australia, there is an acute awareness of Indigenous sovereignty and the histories layered into each site that I can never quite grasp from my migrant-settler perspective. Collecting shells or debris from a beach is not a neutral act, but one that intersects with complex ancestral ties. Photography is likewise approached as a tactile and investigative mode. Sorting through second-hand shops becomes an extension of fieldwork: gleaning images or materials that are out of circulation, poised for reinterpretation.

Site thereby becomes relational, neither purely local nor uniformly global, but always entangled in overlapping histories. Working on Awabakal, Bidjigal, Gadigal, or Worimi Country prompts ongoing reflection about migrant presence on land whose custodianship predates colonization by millennia. This awareness shapes the ethics of gleaning, acknowledging that fragments often bear traces of power imbalances. They carry cultural assumptions – whether from 19th-century imperial albums or modern travel handbooks – that continue to frame global and local understandings.

Collage

Diasporic experiences often manifest as partial attachments or collaged identities, weaving cultural influences from multiple geographies and epochs. Collage invites a visual expression of this multidimensionality. Each cut, splice, or overlap formally echoes the interplay of dislocation and recontextualization. A waterfall might meet a desert canyon at the fold of a page, challenging viewers to linger on the seams instead of the usual spectacle of a singular, pristine landscape. Disorientation transforms into a prompt for deeper observation.

Beyond its disruptive force, collage can also be a site for tentative connection. Fragments that once belonged to different places or narratives find themselves adjacent, forming unexpected links. Diasporic consciousness thrives in these hybrid spaces, where connections remain fluid rather than definitive. There is no illusion of returning to an original whole; the act of assembling emphasizes the provisional. Even so, each collage – like each reshuffled album – constructs a momentary coherence, a framework for reflection on how memory or longing might be rearranged.

Personal traces, larger currents

A credenza crossing an ocean from Poland to Australia can symbolize family memory and the fragility of cultural transplants. In a similar sense, a faded album or a decommissioned travel book each carries intangible residues of prior owners. Removing photographs from an album or slicing landscapes from a reference volume parallels the disjunction often felt by migrants, who navigate partial knowledge of past and future homes.

For me, gleaning such objects from second-hand circuits signals toward diaspora’s fascination with what has been lost, repurposed, or inadvertently preserved. Objects and images that slip out of one narrative may be woven into another. This process underscores the contingent nature of meaning. A photograph of hikers on a volcano might speak to a forgotten day trip but also to broader histories of colonial exploitation. A 19th-century album page might recall a family lineage but likewise embody the legacy of imperial-era photography.

Toward an ethics of reconfiguration

Handling found materials involves certain responsibilities. Acquiring and dissecting a historical album intrudes on a once-private space of memory. Deconstructing scenic reference books interrupts a long-standing narrative of global tourism. Collage could act as an agent of decolonization when it dismantles the authority of singular perspectives, including the Western tourist gaze. If the photobook industry has capitalized on “exotic” landscapes, then slicing and reshuffling those vistas might hint at exposing their original manipulations.

Yet this violent gesture also holds the potential for reimagining. Displacing iconic images from their usual frames can prompt alternative ways of connecting sites and times. The new shapes, overlaps, and negative spaces generated by collage confront assumptions about what is stable, recognizable, or worthy of admiration. Such disruptions affirm that behind each seemingly fixed scene there are hidden complexities – cultural, political, environmental – waiting to be acknowledged.

Attentive assembly

The annotation on that photograph – “Taken on the same day as the other photo” – exemplifies how memory objects often allude to something just beyond reach. Diaspora heightens this effect. The “other photo” could be an alternative perspective or a parallel narrative that is lost. Albums, reference books, postcards, or forgotten prints in second-hand shops become fragments in a larger tapestry of displacement. Their gleaned status reveals how ephemeral any record of a life or a place can be.

These projects – whether photographing the empty pages of a 19th-century album or slicing through a picture-packed compendium of natural and human-made wonders – reflect the interplay of fragmentation and reconstruction that underpins my diasporic experience. Page by page, collage by collage, they render visible the partial and sometimes contradictory nature of remembering. While such acts of gleaning and rearranging cannot fully restore what is lost in migration or colonization, they offer meaningful ways to grapple with those absences. The resulting images propose new maps of connection, where different times and geographies meet and transform each other.

Standing in Warsaw or working in Australia foregrounds how images and objects migrate alongside people, continuously crossing borders of meaning. Each gleaned fragment enters a network of cultural associations that exceeds any one narrative. Engaging these fragments becomes an exercise in attentive assembly, wherein the ephemeral holds the power to evoke layers of history and identity. Such an approach does not claim completeness; rather, it underscores the generative potential of albums, gleaning, and collage as potential acts of care, inquiry – and reconfiguration.