“Whether or not the stories are ‘true’ is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.” These words preface Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1962). But they could just as easily precede the photographs in this feature. In little oneiric albums, each conceived as a diptych, Diana Nicholette Jeon reflects on personal and shared experiences of memory and dream.
“Due to the ephemeral nature of both memory and dreams,” Jeon explains, “I have placed these images in tins, to simulate the memory boxes in which people store their family photographs and mementos. A book of visions to sort through, like a collection of pictures we barely recognize yet somehow relate to as having experienced.”
In her series, “Nights as Inexorable as the Sea,” each volume opens with a chapter. And in the chapter is only a beginning and an end, though which comes first is never clear. The highway hotel, the darkened door, the shadow in the chair, the path into the weeds—all common enough, in their way, yet totally strange, totally unknowable. The journey from one to the other is short, and the tin easily closed. That, at least, is a truth that Jeon and the rest of us share.