The Burden of Memory
June 7 – 30, 2007
“With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us. The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us.”
From About Looking by John Berger
On one of the first spring days of 1997, while I was photographing in a Sacramento, California neighborhood, a half-dozen young men beat, kicked and stomped me nearly to death. When I began to re-surface about a week later, I found myself residing in Sierra Gates, a quiet, pine-paneled brain injury treatment facility, not quite clear on how I had arrived there or even why I was there at all. In the two months that followed I would take the first unsteady steps I needed to take to rebuild my life, which would include re-learning how to walk. I even needed to re-learn how to remember.
Six months after my release, as an exercise with my speech therapist, I began to return to Sierra Gates to photograph. Having been attacked because I was a photographer I needed, as much as anything else, to learn to be a photographer again. But I had taken pictures there for about a year before I learned that I was trying to photograph my own completely altered experience of life.
A native of Missouri, John Trotter worked as a newspaper photojournalist for 14 years, locally and internationally, until March 24, 1997, when he was nearly murdered by a half-dozen young men while on assignment for The Sacramento Bee, where he worked as a staff photographer. After many years in a box, photographs he took during his long recovery from his subsequent brain injury are becoming a book with Red Hook Editions, The Burden of Memory.
In 2001, Trotter began photographing in Mexico for his project No Agua, No Vida about the human alteration of the Colorado River. He has photographed along the entire 2,250 km length of the river, from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to the desiccated remains of its delta above the Gulf of California. He has lived in New York City since 2000 and in 2017 became one of the founding members of the collective, MAPS Images.