Jacob Perlmutter: These Are Your Memories

‘These Are Your Memories’ is a bespoke collection assembled for Dandy Collective. It fuses my photographs from around the world to serve as a fabricated memory bank - a fictitious narrative that feels both familiar and strange - classic, yet dynamically fresh. Among the series are photographs from my project ‘88 Days’, during which I travelled America with a backpack of 35mm film and my camera with one fixed lens. My journey was dictated by others and I travelled the country by Greyhound bus, taking stranger’s recommendations of destinations. This freewheeling, transient and nomadic approach enabled liberation and I found the project to be about myself just as much as it was the people I met along the way.

I built a darkroom in my shed and processed and printed the shots myself over a long, cold London winter. 88 days of travelling America condensed into a series of contact sheets. What mysterious transformations. The photos are for me and for everyone. They are personal, but I hope also representative - anyone can bring their own narrative to the work - like a good song.

‘These Are Your Memories’ is my offering to you, to find yourself in these blends of reality and fiction, to spot your soul in unknown lands frozen in unfamiliar scenes that somehow feel more honest to who you truly are than your own skin.