Soon it will be five years of having this blog and I’ve pretty much made it a policy not to reveal too much or anything about myself up here.  I’ve started blog posts like this before.  Usually right before I tell a really big story about some kind of personal story to me.  Well, on the near-versary of having this blog, I’m about to take a big leap.  I’m going to tell a big story about my life, how it influenced the photos I post.

I’m not American.  I mean I am now, but if fate had gone the way it was supposed to, I would have been something else.  I would have been Polish.  For a while I thought about this almost daily, about how my life would have been different had we stayed in Poland, what kind of person would I be.  I think most certainly I wouldn’t live or die by Mad Men premieres, nor would I be a Red Sox fan.  But I guess that is just surface.  I’m sure they’d be some other ephemera I’d be obsessed with.

As a child, my mother and I would visit Poland, specifically a town called Lodz.  Lodz is a place that has long intrigued me, as it is where in my passport it indicates I am born and it is just an interesting place in and of itself.  It is full of old factories and history and has given the world people like Artur Rubenstein and Daniel Libeskind.  Half of my family still live there.

On our frequent visits there when I was a child, we would visit my great aunt.  My grandfather was an old Siberian, of the kind of stock that rose everyday at 4am and never wore a scarf even on the coldest days.  My grandfather had a big family, which became a smaller family after World War II.  My grandfather’s sister lived in Lodz and when my mother would go and visit, we’d go visit her.  I was about 11 at the time and my great aunt was probably close to 80 at the time.  She always smiled at me and fed me chocolates.  Those are important things at that age.

My mother and my great aunt would go into conversation and I would look around.  My great aunt lived in a neighborhood with all of these industrial brick buildings and I always wondered “who lives there?  What did they used to be?”  Even at 11 I wished I had a camera to photograph all of it.

I frequently trace the subjects and style of my photos to two things — growing up in New York City in the 1980s and those trips to Lodz as a kid.  Brick buildings.  Old industrial brick buildings, full of mystery: