Fall in the Bull City, Revisited

If life is about the journey and not the destination, so too is photography a lot of the time. You go out, you take photos, you come home. Sometimes you ingest them into your computer and edit them, and sometimes they just sit there on your hard drive, waiting to be processed. A new project comes along, a new batch of photos gets imported, and suddenly you’ve moved on to the next big thing, and the photos never see the light of day.

Sometimes you even get to the point where you process them, but they somehow don’t live up to whatever aesthetic you’re trying to achieve that day, so you throw your hands up, vow to come back to them with a clearer mind and the perspective of distance and time, and then…. well, then you forget that they were there and again, they lie fallow, their potential untapped.

Fortunately, every once in awhile you stumble upon them again while you’re looking for something else. Scrolling through the dates, something catches your eye, and you think to yourself, “huh, that’s actually not too bad. Maybe I can do something with these photos.” So then you process them again, with time and distance and perspective on your side. Sometimes this process works, other times you remember again why you got so frustrated with them in the first place. This, you tell  yourself, this is why you don’t delete anything that has even remote promise. Because you might come back to it and find that you might even like it.

I am glad for any opportunity to see my hometown with fresh eyes, to photograph the familiar in a new way, in new light, with new perspectives. If nothing else, it is a pleasant journey through familiarity and time, a way to enjoy the milieu of the town I have watched grow and transform.