The Burden of Memory

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 definded who they were. It is also a testament to those faced with caring for these once-independent adults.
Since 2000 John Trotter has been invited every year to the international photography festival Visa Pour l'image in Perpignan, France. He has also won prestigious awards at the Santa Fe Center of Photography and Pictures of the Year International competition with photographs on the Colorado River Delta, the first post-brain-injury work of his new life, published since in US News and World Report and Orion magazines.