A place where teen angst and delinquency reared its head many 'a weekend. A place I look back fondly and think of whenever I reminisce of being carefree and without anxiety. I especially remember how quiet it was, only hearing the breeze flow through the tall grass.
Grandeur : I remember taking this image with my grandfather while showing me the printing presses at the Mercury News. They'd slowly been stripped of electronics, parts sold off, or simply scrapped. It felt like were were walking through a temporary time capsule, so much frozen in time just as the Printing Engineers had left it. It was surreal seeing the last moments of something so once fundamentally powerful come to an end. Some of these machines were the size of two or three story buildings, and all to print ink on thin pieces of tender paper. I think out of every photo I've taken I've repeatedly felt this snapshot to be my favorite. In truth, it is a snapshot of my grandfather, meaning and power coming later in life as an adult with more introspection and thoughtfulness with their work. Juxtaposing someone I consider to be a powerful force in my life to these immense, vast, and intricate machines; moreover displaying an emotion that I can only describe as bittersweet wonder.
Void : It only took 6 months to empty the entire machine warehouse of its Printers. Just months prior having willfully become lost amongst the machines, the paint mixers, and vast array of once occupied tool boxes, they all sat out in the parking lot in tipper bins. All that was heard was the steady, persistent, and ear numbing hum of the hundreds of lights above in the now empty warehouse.
I remember standing in doorway of one of the dwellings recreated in the image of what once lie on the grounds of President James Madison's Montpelier Estate in silence. Throughout the tour, I remained fairly stoic, but it was the moment in these shanty shed like homes that the intensity of the environment got to me. I thought of how generations past my distant relative Paul Jennings had to endure enslavement upon the same grounds I now toured. It was powerful and humbling.
While visiting Chase City, Virginia, returning back to my Great Aunt's farm, I remember she stopped for me and told me to get out, pointing out this structure deep in the back of a field. It was clearly abandoned, but she explained that this home was once one of her fathers friends, a neighbor who often gave her and her family "Homemade Molasses ."
The first long exposure I was truly proud of. Taken at Country View road, one of the only places where us youth felt free to do as we pleased with nearly no consequence.
Japan's countryside from the perspective of the Tokaido Shinkanzen. Watching the countryside race by at 150 or so miles an hour with a soundtrack playing was whimsical, the entire trip is something I cherish deeply.
Taken on a less frequented line to Osaka's Commemorative Expo Park. It was the only moment while on the two week trip where there wasn't a single other soul in the car with us. It was a moment I experienced as if watching a scene from a movie, removing myself from the moment and simply visually what was before me.
Shot on Cinestill 800 near Shin-Ōkubo station. This was taken on a walk I took alone around 10 pm, admittedly it was one of two times where I felt a profound sense of melancholy. I still haven't exactly interpreted why I felt this way, unsure weather it was fatigue from visiting a new country, or perhaps a deeper sense of the unknown. Those two hours I walked I wasn't seeking out "cool tourist photo" opportunities of gimmicky sites, but moments that justified using my single role of film. The solitude of the walk and the reasoning for it manifested in thoughts of feeling alone, walking dark paths in search of something, perhaps belonging or purpose. I noticed many things while walking around alone, namely that you truly feel by ones self. No one bothers you, no one even really looks at you, just walks around you. In the US, if you're walking down the street you constantly feel like you're on edge, or that you have to anticipate someone interacting with you. I didn't feel that at all in Tokyo. Despite being in the densest urban sprawl in the world, surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of people at any given moment I felt the most alone in those two hours I have ever felt in my life.
