My latest series, A Dream Half Remembered, continues my exploration of personal and collective memories. Employing a formal quality consistent with my previous work, this series focuses on the shards of memory retained from the dream state, and the oftentimes-random structure and narrative of dreams. The series cuts between portraits of family and strangers, landscapes, animal imagery, and other familiar yet ambiguous scenes. The randomness that can be employed when sequencing and presenting this series will help evoke the shifting of people, place and narrative that occurs in a dream. The diffusion of focus strips away much specificity from the subject, allowing for a broader reading of the work.

Ken Rosenthal, Tucson, May 2005

Recently, while paging through albums of family photographs, I was struck by the realization that many of the pictures that were bringing back strong memories occurred before I was born, or at times or places I was not present. These memories were so vivid, yet were indeed false memories. Fascinated with how many of our recollections can be attributed to a photograph, dream or story as opposed to an actual experience, I began to cull imagery from archives of family photographs and personal work. Seen and Not Seen is a merging of the autobiographical and the universal. Most of the photographs in this series are intensely personal, yet many speak to a common experience. Interestingly, as this body of work has evolved, some images have become so resonant that the lines between experience and invention have blurred even more. Like life itself, this series is at once true and fictitious, remembered and reconstructed, seen and not seen.