THE LOST FILES

 

Autumn 2008. I wake up one morning, and it's all gone.

 

One moment I feel on the verge of a genre-defining photographic shift – feverishly leading the charge in a style that has yet to even be defined; questioning everything that I had ever learned about photography, and pursuing that which the eye could not see. Passionate. Inspired. Liberated.

 

The next moment, I had nothing. A Verbetim hard drive failure not only wiped away a good two years' work, it had so deeply broken me emotionally that it would be almost a full year before I could return to “Impressions” with any sense of renewed enthusiasm.

 

The 28 images here, and a small handful like them, are the only remnants of that time. Painstakingly scraped together from various email attachments, cached previews and assorted thumbnails, all but one of them are only 800 pixels wide and can never be faithfully printed larger than the images you see here.

 

They may not serve much commercial purpose, but seeing them together like this feels like a personal act of defiance and triumph for what I have had to rebuild since that day when all felt lost. They remain as a tribute to what may very well be the most important period in my photographic awakening.