In 2011, my family faced a truly seismic occurrence in the death of my father, Charles Quay Dickey. This photographic series, titled 4:30, expresses personal memory relating to my father’s accident, surgery, hospital confinement, and subsequent death.
These photographic juxtapositions, assembled from motion picture appropriations and actual imagery, serve as avatars of experience. The film appropriations, charged with emotions and expression, coupled with personal imagery that is objective and restrained, creates an interesting contrast. This contrast, between the emotional and the objective, serves as an ideal representation of memory.
In creating the photographs, I appropriated imagery from Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological thriller, Strangers on a Train, featuring a climatic fight on a berserk carousel and the 1971 science fiction film, The Andromeda Strain, about a team of scientists investigating an uncontrollable viral organism. Then using highly personal imagery from home and hospital, I constructed each work to coincide with the timeline of events. For titles, I selected corresponding quotes from the screenplay of the 1964 cold war film, Fail-Safe; about a technical error that causes a series of events that lead to a nuclear crisis.