Greetings. It’s been 7 years since I last made a post here, before it was abandoned along with the rest of my life at that time. This was 2013. This blog's previous posts covered my first explorations along the highways and byways of the United States and the numerous photo projects it inspired, both personal and collective. Many of the posts were concerned with being a new immigrant, the recession, returning to school, marriage, working as an EMT and of course traveling and photography. Now, 7 years later, all of these things are gone, except for photography, I never stopped taking pictures.
With the resurrection of this blog I hope to not start afresh so much, but begin with bridging the time between this post and the last and attempt to assemble into some form of coherent narrative, a pathway through these lost years. At the same time I will be trying to make sense of this journey myself, for the first time, in the form of sharing key photographs made along the way. With these pictures I would like to include a commentary, which may well be an exercise in personal process for me too. Perhaps I will give the photographs context and unpack the circumstances which were surrounding its making and why I lifted my camera to make the picture in the first place. Other stuff too, personal and diaristic. These details are, as yet to be determined and I may do something else entirely, but I hear it helps to focus one's intentions by stating them first.
Of course when I say lost years, I do not mean entirely so. Over this period it’s true my online presence was indeed minimal and I had been, until last year, without a phone for the entire 7 year period. This was my choice and I have never been completely offline for more than a week or so anyway. There were many times though, I was completely unreachable, without a single other person knowing what my location was. It is an eerie feeling to realize one's solitary place in a wild and unfamiliar world that you know nothing about and is completely indifferent to your presence in it. And that strange stillness too, out in the darkness, beyond the light of the campfire, that shifting sense of scale and self. It is like I can feel the mountain reaching upwards and losing its balance. I can feel the ten thousand year yawn of the canyon close by and I can feel how the silence is thickened with the shadows of their presence. How much of the world is actually there and how much is the flickering movie of my mind projecting its phantoms upon it? It’s a beautiful and terrifying thing to behold and it can make a person take stock and pay attention fast. It is also a rare feeling to experience these days too, and to be truly out-of-touch is, for me, a privilege and I have been grateful to enjoy pockets of it between here and there.
