How I keep the faith
MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Thesis, 2026

Nostalgia for past times and places blooms most viscerally in moments of turbulent cultural transition. But what happens when our own nostalgic memories fall short as a space of respite? How does nostalgia function when ‘unprecedented’ and ‘exponential’ become the two kinds of change for which we most frequently brace? 

In the wake of incessant technological intervention swirls a longing for idealised pasts and ghosts of lost futures. Pasts, ghosts, that are shared, reproduced, circulated, within the continuous now of the flattened digital landscape. Pasts, ghosts, in the form of movies, photographs, music, consumer products, stories, that traverse from screen to screen, mind to mind, in a cycle that grows in tandem with technology’s grip. The more we ‘progress,’ the stronger this resurgence of past aesthetics in the present, a resurgence both intentional and involuntary, a side effect of and response to our hyper-mediated reality. 

How I keep the faith explores the tensions between this mythologised analogue past and today’s technocentric present. Such myths exist in the relationship between mind and place; they are the work of internal landscape being projected onto external surroundings. In this work, nowhere are these myths more alive than within the artist’s childhood environments on Long Island, where the visual language of Americana sits washed out by the sun at every turn. In a temporally-confused sequence of mental images of home brought to life through super8 film, the boundaries between then and now, memory and myth, and public and personal dissolve. 

These mental images, offered in glimpses through a carousel slide projector, approach time as a loop of present-past-future; past itself as an inescapably mediated assemblage of story, imagination, and prosthetic memory. 

Nostalgia lives within the circling of the carousel; backwards, forwards. It’s existence in the present is a rebellion; a resistance; a resilience. A keeping of the faith. 

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