When I was ten years old I went through a medical procedure that left my eyes fully bandaged for weeks. I remember well two things about that experience -- without sight my other senses changed greatly, and the darkness became somewhat familiar and at the same time fearful. I had heard that people who loose their sight acquire heightened remaining senses, and I was fascinated by this prospect. I would imagine visions of the world around me, often with areas merging into the darkness of my closed eyes. Saltine crackers were the only things I wanted to eat because their distinctive taste clearly matched my memory of them. Everything else tasted different, suspect. I liked to lie in the grass with my face burrowed into the earth. The quiet assumed a different nuance, both hollow and sumptuous. Certain sounds embraced the darkness, like the sound of the wind or water moving, something fundamental and solitary.
In the doctor's office, the sound of window blinds being lowered and the unwrapping of bandages merged in a way that has remained indelible in my mind. The light coming through my unbandaged closed eyes was excruciating. I told the doctor that I didn't want to open my eyes ever again.
The photographs I have been making for the past thirty years are in part informed by a remembrance of that experience. The places I'm attracted to engage my senses in ways similar to those of the ten year old boy in bandages. I go out into the world to places where I sense something of meaning has once occurred and lingers. While photographing I feel out of time, blinded from my everyday life. I'm looking both out into the world and back into self, where the world in front of me appears both familiar and mysterious.
My photographs are narratives that speak to events in my life ranging from the birth of my two daughters to the struggle with life threatening illness. The photographs present a timeline that both subverts and embraces notions of a linear calendar.
Tom Young