Dora Do

Artist Statement

My family is obsessed with movies. For a suburban immigrant family, it was our way of escaping from our monotonous lives to something more imaginative and exciting. We could pretend to be somewhere, to be someone else. Growing up, I watched my favorite movies over and over until I could play them entirely in my head. They brought me comfort. As I grew up, I realized my fondest memories were tied to a longing and nostalgia for times and places that didn’t exist.

When I was 18, I began learning film photography with a small plastic toy camera that looked like a milk carton. Looking through the prints off the very first roll, I had that same feeling of nostalgia. The pictures were a little blurry and had many light leaks, but all of those elements together made me feel like I was recalling something from long ago. I think this is the way these kinds of moments are stored in our memories: dreamy, imperfect, and bonded by the emotions you felt when you pressed the shutter button.

Through the lens of my camera, I could frame my life like the movies I watched growing up. The most mundane, everyday moments became romantic. As I grew and traveled, I took my camera everywhere, and found that every city is strung together by these mundane moments. I wanted to bottle the emotions I felt standing in the middle of the street, trying to absorb every piece of it, and I hoped that everything I saw through my eyes and felt in my heart would meld into a single photograph.