I don’t mean to use this blog as a space for a memoir, but I guess it kind of has become that. I’ll be 47 this year, omg that looks so old. How did I get this old? I look in the mirror and don’t see an old face. The grays, they are there. But then I go to work and see a student on my roster who was born in 2005 and is sitting there fully formed in front of me. 

In my mind as well, influenced by my peripatetic wandering last summer, my Eat Pray Herman time, I have had time to explore the other times when I did that, namely during my Wilderness Years, where I had no fixed address anymore. I wasn’t living with my parents anymore but I wasn’t settled anywhere yet and I was just kind of wandering around, trying to figure out exactly where I even belong in this world.  

I had another sort of time when I took a sort of “sabbatical.”  In March 2009, I left my last job media job in New York, feeling dejected and hollowed out.  I didn’t make a decision to go on this sabbatical but it was just a time of contemplation.  Whenever I have a problem in my life, I do a couple of things.  I write, I take pictures and I do something physical.  During my 2009 sabbatical, I walked around New York with my camera.  And I wrote this blog, when it was in a completely different form.

Photography is something that has just always been in the background for me.  Its not linear for me and I am always working on mastering a new aspect of it.  I see people’s photography and it seems so “neat.”  I meet people who do photography and they take these cut glass flat landscapes and that’s great, but not my approach to photography.  To me, it’s always been trying to certain type of photography.  Maybe I should put “master” in quotation marks, because I don’t really think we ever really become masters of things.  Maybe becoming proficient in something might be a better way of putting it.  I find a type of photography and I try to become proficient in it and I might labor at it for a while, be happy with my results and then abandon it and start on something else.

Recently I joined a group on Facebook called “The New Topography.”  The photography there is of man made structures in landscapes.  Or as I like to call them — there’s absolutely nothing going on in that photo, but it’s beautiful.  I would take it out a little further and say that I have always been fascinated by these decontextualized photos.  Again with the cut glass flat landscapes, it screams where the person is but when it comes to the types of photography that  I like to do takes away a lot of the context of where you are.  My favorite kind of thing is really to photograph things that could be anywhere because it is beautiful.  You take what surrounds you and you make it beautiful.  

I did my early photography in Washington DC, my real exploration into photography started there.  Washington DC is such an iconic place, with some of the most famous landmarks in the entire world.  The city has an old fashioned feel to it.  At first when I went there, I was photographing the landmarks.  Then one day I realized that I had gone from taking pictures of landmarks to photographing raindrops on my windows at night, the bottom of flag poles, escalators and just these really mundane things.  

One of my favorite thing was photographing my path to work in Falls Church.  I can’t even describe what that area was like.  The general feeling I always got in all of my years in Northern Virginia, especially on my myriad of weird adventures with Herman, was that most of the buildings looked like they had been built with the thinking that it would be there temporarily and then they just kept it.  I use the term “architectural style” loosely here, as I’m not sure there exists a word to describe office and apartment buildings that looked like someone sat down at a drafting table, drew a vertical rectangular box, drew some windows on it and called it a day.  At that time, Five Guys was a business with three storefronts in Northern Virginia, in a scenic area called Bailey’s Crossroads.  “Scenic.”  It was such a weird place.  I remembered thinking that this area was almost like it had been planned inside out. How the area was planned was that it should really have inside a mall or some place like that, but for some strange reason, it was outside. It was an inside place built outside. There were sidewalks that no one ever walked on and buses that you never saw. Was this built for pedestrians? No. Anyway, Herman and I spent a lot of time at Five Guys so I had a lot of time to contemplate this.  For a while, it was the one form of solid food I ate, but that story is for another day.

One day, while enjoying a burger and listening to Herman tell some other manic story about his days of bookstore ownership in Baltimore, I realized that we could be anywhere.  There was no feeling that we were even in Virginia.  The only thing that told you that we were in Virginia were road signs and license plates.  What was even stranger was that I saw beauty in these places.  I cannot stress how un-beautiful these places actually were.  Do you find parking lots beautiful?  How about random concrete high-rises?  Somehow I found this all quite beautiful.  

It came into my mind after a while that maybe that could be reflected in my photography work, this feeling of — well, we could really be anywhere.  You don’t get that rush of “oh THAT’S where that is.”  Rather its — that’s a parking lot that nothing much is happening in and you know what, it’s beautiful.  

I’m not the first person to ever come to this realization, that those kinds of photos can exist.  For me though, that has so much more of an impact than a picture taken of the Grand Canyon with some crazy powerful camera with a huge sensor and the sharpest lens in the world.  Maybe if there’s some ugly strip mall with the Grand Canyon in the background, that might have a greater emotional impact.  I mean put it this way.  When it comes to photography jealously, which is how I measure if a photograph is having an impact, I feel no photography jealously for a flat image of some famous landmark.  But an image of a broken down car with a vast prairie behind it or someone who photographs the inside of a giant box store in a compelling way, I will spend the next couple of years trying to figure out how to photograph that.  

As this entry started to take shape, I started thinking — I have a lot of photos like that, where the context has been removed but they make an impact in other ways.  There’s a kind of feeling in the photograph that says — that could be anywhere, but I feel an impact.  There are still so many photographs like that I want to master.  I see these pictures of these random hotel rooms and they fascinate me but my own attempts at that kind of photography have thus far not produced the kinds of results I wanted.  My attempts are always just — that’s a hotel room, not that’s a hotel room with a MOOD.

Anyway, I applied a my fierce curatorial eye to my online portfolio of 30,000 photos and pulled out what I thought were the best examples of decontextualized but yet impactful photos.  Since I take so many pictures, most of these have never really been seen by anyone before.  I take the best photos and put them up here, wrapping a narrative around them.  These photos really don’t have a narrative.  I mean I giving them a narrative now, where they it didn’t used to exist.