Welcome to no. 40 in our series Poignant Pics where our editor, Diana Nicholette Jeon, writes about Aimee B. Mccrory's hauntingly beautiful image, "The Ghost Chair."

Haunted

“I’m back there again, broken from being a champion,
The boy that no one loved,
The years I spent training like a method actor to
Become the man that everyone admired,
But it means nothing,
Like ashes on a forehead, they marked me inferior,
When I was still young enough to receive it into the grain of my being”
― Terrence Alonzo Craft, The Seed Bridge: Collected Poems

Memories resurface and make themselves known unexpectedly, triggered by anything from the bars of a song to an image, or sometimes nothing at all. A building can be shut down or abandoned, and then perhaps the landscaping overgrows, walls develop mildew, and ceilings cave in—but that doesn't make it go away. Memory is the same. We 'see' events unfold in our memories, ghostly apparitions of parts of our life now past. Sometimes the memories are fleeting and joyful; other times, they are disturbing. Either way, these ghosts are entirely present within us.

Depending on the circumstance, it is sometimes difficult to fully excavate some traumas, as we have instinctively, subconsciously, and self-protectively decided which memories to retain consciously. Yet despite our instinctual urge to protect ourselves, the memories deeper beneath that surface are often negative — the ones where you experienced that you weren't good enough, couldn't achieve, or worse. Often, we judge the past through the eyes of who we are in the present. However, our present selves wouldn't act as we did back then; we've grown and matured and hopefully are wiser. Yet we often give these traumatic memories much power over our adult selves. 

Developing this article, I learned that according to research conducted by Danker and Anderson, remembering reactivates the brain regions engaged during the encoding of memories. This means that the process of remembering a past event involves literally returning to the brain state that was present during it.* I process many of my experiences, current or memorialized, via my image-making practice. I usually find making those images painful and sometimes need to wait till times I am less fragile to work on them. But this practice is also the trigger of my most significant cathartic healing. Perhaps that is due to the return to that brain state, perhaps not. I'm no scientist, so I will leave that for the pros to determine.  

Without knowing the backstory, one can sense that Aimee Mccrory's Ghost Dress is ‘that type of image.’ I'm sure that that is what drew me to this image when I saw it, that sense of kinship with its creator that the photograph brought me, that I knew and understood it without actually knowing at all. I was captivated and had to learn more.

Asked about the image, Aimee told me that it was part of a series called The Incident of the Lavender Dress, which "originated from a childhood trauma that remained lodged in memory for the past sixty-five years," which recently resurfaced. As a young girl, she had accidentally spilled nail polish on her brand new dress. She continued, "As a consequence, my mother tore my dress into shreds as punishment. The stain it left lay deep within my soul…As a little girl, I thought I was upset about the dress. In reality, the real rip was the one between me and my mother."

The image is beautiful but haunted, and it has a human presence even in the absence of people. The dress, surrounded by the swirling mist, is as forlorn as if it were an aging beauty queen. Like an elegy honors a person, it is reverent to the crumpled and torn dress. But what it actually esteems is the small child within that has come to find that the judgment she held on to as a lens to view herself is just not reality. In the end, the photography honors letting go and healing. 

Bravo, Aimee! I look forward to seeing more images that make me feel as deeply as this one does.

*Danker and Anderson, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853176/

Artist Bio

Aimee B. Mccrory was born in Houston, Texas. Her work focuses on self portraiture, feminist themes, the. process of aging, and essential familial relationships along with their complexities.

She has studied with Keith Carter, Arthur Meyerson, Chehalis Hegner, and Lynn Lane. An active member of the Houston arts community, she is a member of The Houston Museum of Fine Arts Photo Forum.

Aimee’s work has been exhibited at Houston Center for Photography, Praxis Gallery, and SE4P (SC). Her work has been published in Shots Magazine, The TX Photographic Society Newsletter, and Buzz Magazine.

See more of Aimee’s work here.

Author Bio

Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI, who works primarily with lens-based media. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC.