Memento Mori is a Latin phrase meaning "Remember your mortality," or "Remember your death." It is not meant to be gory or repulsive in any way; rather, the intent is to remind the viewer that death is a natural part of life. This can be shown in many ways, such as giving life to something long-since dead; examining the death of something once living; or portraying mortality in any artistic manner.

My concentration works show the idea of Memento Mori by expressing to the viewer a rather vivid sense of mortality. I asked myself “What makes me remember my own death?”  and “How can I portray this in a single image?” It was a much tougher process than I initially expected it to be, and it took nearly half the year to finally reach a breakthrough. This breakthrough came in the form of getting myself locked in one of Oregon’s oldest graveyards—at night.

As I sat and waited for the security guard to let me out, I began considering what Memento Mori really meant. Up to that point, most of my images were very literal photographs of dead animals and dilapidated buildings. I realized that I needed a better, deeper, more-profound way to express mortality through my work. I couldn’t capture it all in one image anymore; I needed to create something which felt more three-dimensional. The best way to do this was to use multiple layers in my photographs. My favorite and personal best example of this work is image 1, which is a composite of two images: The background was taken at an abandoned mental hospital, and the foreground is an actual human mummy photographed in Seattle. In all, I believe I was pushed to my mental and technical limits during the course of this year, and am very proud of the final results.