Church of Fun

I have come to distrust memory. Not because it disappears, but because it rearranges itself until what was lived becomes impossible to recover. Looking back at these photographs, I cannot tell whether they preserve a period of my life or whether they have gradually replaced it. Every return rearranges them, and me, a little differently. That uncertainty always leads me back to the same house. In 2022, while temporarily staying in a communal house in West Hollywood, I began photographing the people around me. Rather than documenting the place itself, the images hold onto the feeling of inhabiting it.

The work still carries the smell of that house. What remains from that time is fragmented. I remember certain bodies more clearly than conversations, certain silences more vividly than events. Time has stripped away explanations, leaving behind gestures and atmospheres that feel more reliable than chronology. The photographs do not reconstruct those months so much as the way they return to me now: incomplete, contradictory, and strangely physical.

Intimacy moved unpredictably through the rooms, sometimes comforting, sometimes isolating. The photographs were made from within that proximity, before distance made any of it legible. They became a slow record of a time that moved too fast to understand while it was happening, where closeness rarely arrived with a name. What remains is not the house, but the way it still inhabits me.

Distance, I realize now, was just another way of staying.

Jesus Degollado took part in our Face-to-Face educational feedback program with our Managing Editor Ilaria Sponda during Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026.