In 1997, on assignment in Sacramento, California, John Trotter
was beaten and left for dead by members of a drug-dealing street
gang. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, and spent months
recuperating in Sierra Gates, a rehabilitation facility, where
among other things, he would have to re-learn how to remember.
Trotter hesitantly picked up a camera again after he had left
the clinic, mostly as therapy, and began a vivid and vital record
of his life there among the brain-injured. In so doing he had to
teach himself from the start how to use a camera. The Burden of
Memory is his testament to that time.
His photographs are intelligent, lucid and heartbreaking;
an outstanding example of how the human body can overcome
and regain.
They are also the cold realities and humbled hopes of the men
and women he encountered, in the same situation as him, faced
with uncertain futures, stripped of many of the vital qualities that
once defined who they were. It is also a testament to those faced
with caring for these once-independent adults.
Trotter has photographed his story in colour, producing images
that invite the viewer to render the experiences before them as
lives interrupted, yet looking forward. The Burden of Memory is an
inspiring autobiography in pictures, a life that overcame all odds.
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