I recently heard a writer, I wish I could remember who to give proper credit, say that every story is made up of stories. The notion that every story a writer has heard or read or daydreamed all rattle around in their brain, shaping them, each in their own way, and plays some role in every new story they create stuck with me. Not surprisingly, as this idea took root in my own brain and did a little rattling about of its own, I started thinking about pictures. Is every picture I make made up of all of the pictures I’ve seen, made and thought about making?

The conclusion I’ve come to after muddling over it a bit is, yes. Every picture I make is informed by all those that came before. All the photos, as objects, that I’ve held; the pictures in books and hanging on museum walls that I’ve spent countless hours studying and enjoying; the pictures that were never tangibly preserved and only exist as memories of moments in my mind; and even the pictures that have no physical manifestation – those that I create from nothing with my mind’s eye – all of these inform and play some role in the creation of each new picture I make because these pictures make up me. But I am, an interdisciplinary image appropriator. The books I read, the stories I’m told, the music I listen to, and the movies I watch – my pictures are made in parts of all of these influences too.

And so when I photograph a summer carnival, long a favorite subject of mine, I bring not only my camera and film, but a brain packed full of all of those other trips to the carnival I’ve ever made, read about, recollected and watched on screen. My eyes may react to the immediate moment and the facts of what I see in front of me, but bubbling below the surface are all of the summer Sundays that my father took my brother and me on drives to the country in search of a county fair; the first time my husband and I showed our little girl those colorful night lights, and even the magically transporting experience of reading The Night Circus and the visions I created while the story unfolded. An efficient bit of invisible computer-like code layers emotion, memory and dream onto the simultaneous process at play as the eye and brain work in tandem to convert light into sight.

Each year when carnival season rolls around I come equipped with some new skills or techniques or whatever bit of new-to-me camera tech I’m trying to understand. So, while I see all the old carnivals in each new one, I also meet my subject as a new version of myself with abilities or preoccupations that weren’t present at our last get together. There was the year I came back a second time after we’d put the kids to bed and carried a tripod to practice long exposures, or the first time I left my digital home and hoped that all of those kliegs and neons would provide enough light for my iso800 film.

This year my photographic obsession has been many-multiple exposed film images, and I was truly surprised by how well the technique translated the frenzied carnival atmosphere.

In the following image, I modified the technique, rather than attempting to capture motion, instead I filled the frame with a crazy quilt of many overlapping focus points in an attempt to to illustrate that composite nature of every new experience and being layered and imbued with shadows of its predecessors.

I love carnivals for all the reasons others do – the colors, the lights, the smells, the sounds, but most of all the temporary magic that feels more like a dream than reality as soon as the show packs up, moves on and leaves nothing behind but an empty field, memories, and a fresh batch of images to consider till the next time.