Memory Loss by Mustafah Abdulaziz is forgetting where we are when we are right there

Mustafah Abdulaziz is surrounded by the same landscape, lit by the same saturating afternoon light as the rest of us, but sees things differently, capturing “the scene that strives to appear one way but looks to me another.” Memory Loss is about how people appear in an environment that is so familiar to them that they stop seeing and consequently, forget how they appear in it.

It takes a photographer, ideally one like Mustafah, to freeze the moment and hold it up for us all to marvel at for its strangeness/curiosity/sublimity. These wonderful moments – a singular character in a crowd or a face pulled by a child that a mother doesn’t see – are our total disconnects from a staid reality and, for the most part, we hardly even notice.