I’ve wondered since if it was naivety and we were happily living our isolated lives, sheltered from reality, or if it was about the timing … probably both..
In the beginning of 2016, I moved back to South-East Asia, where I spent my earliest years. This has brought back half-forgotten feelings and hazy memories. Coming back has given me the perfect opportunity to explore these early childhood memories that differ so much from those collected from later periods of my life. As a child I remembered events or details that my adult self would probably find unremarkable and the big life events that an adult might consider important have long disappeared from my memory.
This series combines my written memories and my visual interpretation of these childhood memories as well as family photographs and archival images from those years in the 1960s. My photographs are an instinctive, emotional response to these altered, yet familiar places. By using photographs from my life now, I am both consciously and unconsciously, recreating moments from my past. This process and the photographs themselves enable me to keep these memories alive. The process has proved to be cathartic and has helped to free me of a nagging nostalgia and melancholy caused by an abrupt departure and the loss of a nurturing and happy environment all those years ago.
The years we had in Malaysia were surreally idyllic. I’ve wondered since if it was naivety and we were happily living our isolated lives, sheltered from reality, or if it was about the timing … probably both.
We lived there during a historically peaceful and optimistic era, having arrived two years after the end of the Malayan Emergency and having left just before the 1969 race riots and the subsequent imposition of another emergency rule and the loss of civil liberties. Malaysia has gone on to develop and prosper but that free and breezy mood I remember has gone forever.
PHOTOGRAPHS & TEXT: ALISON MCCAULEY, SINGAPORE. WEBSITE: http://www.amccauley.ch.
Dancing With A Cobra, by Alison McCauley was made during the IPA Mentorship Program. Click to view: More Mentorship Projects.
The IPA Mentorship Program is a photography mentorship initiative by Invisible Photographer Asia (IPA) for those who wish to further their personal photographic vision and goals.
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