Photos, Spring 2025
Introduction
If you walk most days, you see some things. At ground level, traveling between 2.5 miles per hour (when you leave early) and 3.5 miles per hour (when you know you’re late), you have time to look, to observe, and to say to yourself, hey, I should capture this image. I carry all manner of toys — my wife calls it the bag of dorkdom — along with my phone. This year I’ve been using a Nikon D3500 with a 50mm lens and a GoPro 10. I have an iPhone 12 mini that I use for the Spring Garden Bridge shot every day.
Walking changes your perspective. Here’s a recent book that offers a number of perspectives on how. Rebecca Solnit wrote about it too. And at least twice a year, while I’m walking, I listen to this essay again.
For this project I wanted to think about the people and places you can only see when you are walking. Any city vista is a kind of time capsule, a vision of what has come before and what will come next. That fancy word — palimpsest — captures it well, underscoring that you can see the past, the present, and the future together. Part of my walking portfolio, then, has to be about this, about how we see all of these elements together.
Set one: the same spot, over and over again.
Looking into Google photos, where my images are stored, I have taken this picture no less than five hundred times. I stand between the same two poles on the Spring Garden Bridge, try and catch the lines just right, and shoot. I then text it to our family group chat. As I’m generally within a fifteen minute window I could probably figure out the solar calendar with these photos.
Set two: Objects
Each time you walk you find all manner of things that are lost, discarded, picked from the trash, thrown on the ground or dropped. Some I pick up — my dog poop bags work well for this — and carry along. Some are puzzling — what is this and how did it get here — which led me to create page of these pictures for creative writing prompts. Here’s the object; what story would you tell?
Set three: Writing, notes, paper
There is text everywhere. I’m always surprised at the number of notes you can find on the ground, discarded. Reminds me of my days in used book stores, where you’d open a book and find the most poignant inscription; still the book ended up in the discard pile. (Favorite was a gifted book from one famous author to another… guess it didn’t mean much.)
There’s also formal signage — I love this club that has SOME line dancing — as well as graffiti.
From Sunday:
