Lou Jones – distressed:memories is a photography series begun over twenty years ago by Lou Jones. It has been developed and printed in classic black & white as an homage to the very origins of photography. The images are mostly conceived as archetypal dreams & myths. Using all types of antiquing methods, the prints have been aged ("distressed") to depict another time, another age and suggest a different period in history, some before photography was invented. Even though captured with modern day equipment and techniques, the primal nature of photography is what is on display. Each image is highly conceptual and meant to break all types of rules about reality and tradition and be the antithesis of normal photography. The Griffin Museum show is the first time the body of work has been exhibited in its entirety.

Before Matthew Brady’s pictures of Civil War battlefields through Lewis Hines’ images of child labor abuses to current front pages of newspapers showing refugees in, Sudan, photography, from its very inception, has always been document.  Recording the visible.  Photography can also reveal to us things that are too small or too big for us to see with our naked eye.  It is perfect for archiving movements that are too fast or too slow.  But these events inhabit a physical world.  However so much of our existence is invisible: imagination, dreams, fantasy, subconscious, ideas, abstraction, etc.

“I have spent most of my career pursuing long term projects: men/women incarcerated for capital crimes in the book Final Exposure: Portraits from Death Row, living in guerrilla camps during the wars in Central America, for years following pregnant women through their lifecycles.  My photography has chased an external reality.

distressed:memories is my personal labor to document my internal world, i.e. to investigate those things that I know, I have seen but that do not really exist.  Many of the photographs are from my dreams.  These potentials for creation are actualized when they enter consciousness as images.  Photography allows them to graduate from my fantasy and enter the real world.  They may even cross over and maybe reveal shared visions: mythology, fairy tales, religious rituals, universal Jungian archetypes.

Cloaked in the accoutrements of an era long past, distressed:memories is also about time. How time is as much an illusion as dreams.  In Newtonian physics time can only move in one direction.  In the mind time can fluctuate back & forth.  These photographs are document.  They are proof.  They challenge our concept of history too, by combining two realities: antique authority and futuristic novelty.  Society draws from so many myths that those of yesteryear can be compared to new ones that inform popular culture.  The ambiguity is primal.” – LJ

About Lou Jones 

Lou Jones’ eclectic career has evolved from commercial to the personal. It has spanned every format, film type, artistic movement and technological change. He maintains a studio in Boston, Massachusetts and has photographed for Fortune 500 corporations, international companies and local small businesses including Federal Express, Nike and the Barr Foundation; completed assignments for magazines and publishers all over the world such as Time/Life, National Geographic and Paris Match; initiated long term projects on the civilwars in Central America, death row, Olympics Games and pregnancy; and published multiple books.