|
|
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 actually 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 understood that I was trying to understand my own completely altered experience of life.
|
|
|