Elizabeth Orcutt: Autograph “…Always trying to get out of the book, trying to get closer to the moment, and always floating farther from it, slamming myself up against the fact that writing, even the best writing, invariably suppresses and displaces the greater and more intimate part of any experience it seeks to express. Ultimately I would be forced to admit that all the volumes of Proust were nothing, qualitatively compared to the twenty minute experience of eating breakfast on a spring morning at a Denny’s in Mobile.” (Hickey 1997, 164) I have little of Dave Hickey’s eloquence; I simply have my camera. Making a living in journalism, I was stalling with a similar frustration. I found myself unable to show effectively the story behind an image: copies of the world were just not serving me. While working with the charities Chain of Hope and CLIC, I met families that were facing the prospect of losing a child to terminal disease – I discovered what I wanted to explore was the mesh of relationship that is threatened, exposed under such conditions, the structure of hope, fear, desire and disappointment that hold particular identities in place. I wanted to see if I could express those as photographic tableaux.I was forced to introspection, to use myself as source material (and I bless my mother for her archiving ways). I spent hours looking at family photos - remembering, reminiscing, revising and recreating. Always trying to get out of the photograph, closer to the moment, I now know that the happy child who performed for the camera in my family was better than, worse than, always someone who never was me. Hickey Dave, (1997) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy. Art Issues. Press Los Angeles