Some of my most recent work featuring some of my oldest work. Cyanotypes and toned cyanotypes.

In a box, in the rarely used closet, in the extra bedroom that has become the kid's den, there is a binder filled with negatives.

A few weeks ago I dug the binder out and started scanning its contents. All the photographs I'd taken going all the way back to the summer of 2001.

It is interesting the things which are significant to me in them now. The cars on the streets. The way people dressed. All this work I did, but never did anything with. I can remember how I felt taking them. It is a visceral feeling, looking off onto my old horizons. Forgotten and found in a box in the back of a closet.

I'm slowly scanning my way through the binder. Uploading them into the digital era. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet. I love the idea of making something with these old negatives. It feels like picking up lost threads. Coming full circle to finish that which I wasn't able to finish back then.

As I sit here, scanner purring away, I'm thinking about how value changes over time. Maybe it is because I'm in my midlife crisis era, or because I've got a little distance from the gaping maw of Instagram, but I'm thinking about how temporary many of the artifacts we would leave behind are.

Having been promoting myself on Instagram for almost a decade a remarkable amount of my history is there. All it would take is a shift in ownership, or terms of service, and that would all be gone.

I've got backups, sure, but no one is going to find my old photo editing apps in the back of a closet.

Nostalgia can be dangerous, wishing for a return to a place that never was, but it can also be the roots that keep us from washing away in the stream of time.

As I load another strip of negatives into the carrier for scanning I'm thinking about the Spotify playlists that won't be thumbed through in the back of dusty record shops by future generations. The clothes we wear for a season and then discard not lining the rack of vintage shops. Our collective digital memories sitting in an abandoned server farms. All of these things we'd leave behind washed away in the current.

I remember the smell of it the most. Growing up a child of antique dealers I spent a lot of time in barns. Cloistered stacks of mismatched chairs. Bent cardboard boxes of plates wrapped in newspaper. Glass and brass doorknobs bereft of station catching sunlight from dirty dormer windows.

There is a smell to it. Dust, yes, but also wet stone and old carpet and the buttery, aged smell of old paper. Minwax. Solvents. All bundled up in a smell that says old and surplus and sacred.

There is a bit of sacrilege in these spaces. Items of personal value, deprived of their person, and left to gather dust. As a child walking down the narrow aisles I felt towered over. Their previous owners looking down at me, telling me not to bump anything, to not touch.

I have a steamer trunk in my studio from one of those barns in my childhood. It holds oil, paper, mat board, and the beginnings of work that will someday exist as not just ideas in my head.

The inside of the trunk is still lined with the fabric it came with. A blue on white floral pattern that now serves as the substrate for a topographic map of stains, and patina. The warp and weft of time wrinkled fabric making mountain ranges across its surface.

There is magic here too. In this interplay between man made intention and the chaos of time and circumstance. The pattern on its own is interesting, but it is the intersection of it and the stains that have come to inhabit it that make it singular.

I think I look for this in my own work. The uneven distribution of dye when rubbed into the surface of leather. The estuaries and tidemarks of wet chemistry brushed on heavy paper. Opportunities for collaboration with chance to make something greater than I could have on my own. Work that speaks of my carefully patterned intention and the mottled and frayed edges of the life that brought me here. The humility of ideas tarnished by reality but the more beautiful for their imperfections.

A small bit of that childhood magic found in hushed and dusty spaces.