Dominic Bugatto’s Photographs From ‘The Unreliability Of Memory’

Dominic Bugatto‘s photographs from ‘The Unreliability Of Memory’ play with the nature of the medium and the falsity that underlies every image we capture of space and time, every picture that signposts our life.

We have all trawled through family albums and remembered that moment, that exact time and place, our own myth woven around a single photograph. A story whose narrative is unfinished, ongoing. And with this single thought in mind Bugatto takes us wandering into the nooks and crannies of his hometown of Toronto taking beautiful images that illustrate this sense of story. An unknown narrative into which we can apply context and meaning. As if we were there. Ordinary everyday occurrences; reflections, seasonal changes, shop fronts and road works, all of them common, universal pictures that could be the props and backgrounds to our own history.

It’s an interesting concept. An artist looking to recreate a universal memory, his photographs projecting a common truth, or rather the lie that memory is the truth, is history, is fact. This simple conceit, that that photograph is a lie, is what makes these photographs so fascinating to ruminate on. For pictures are only one persons perception of the world around them. They can never be objective. This play on picture taking gives Bugatto the space to make beguiling images that take us on a meandering through his world and by extension ours.

And while I’ve been unable to find out very little about his photographic work – Bugatto is primarily an illustrator – I do know that his desire to capture the world on film only came after the birth of his children. This salient fact once again gives rise to the notion of memory; of fleeting time, mortality and the perception we have of the world. With children we begin to face mortality, our history comes to light and we begin to seek out alternate views, attempt to see the world through our offspring’s eyes, perceive the universe in an entirely new way. Here’s what Bugatto has to day about his photography:

There’s something very meditative about just ‘wandering’ with camera in hand and happening upon something that captures your attention. You don’t seek out photos , in a sense , they find you. I’m a great believer in the philosophy of photographing ‘Democratically’, there’s something potentially interesting in everything you see.