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.

Part two

Sowing Seeds in the Dark

How do you know when an idea has run its course?

For me it just fizzles out one day. The last set of images I made for this collection worked that way. As I took them from between the blotter sheets I was drying them between I could see the spark had gone out. I think I knew it while I was making them.

An idea runs it's course. They grow from little seeds, blossom, ripen, and then die off, hopefully leaving a few new seeds behind.

For now I'm done thinking about developing these images. When I started this project I had an idea of mostly white images with ghostly hints of leaves. What I ended up with was different and I think more satisfying.

I made a few pieces that have that ghostly quality.

What I really fell in love with was what happens when I toned them. You can't tell when you look at the images but the way the light hits the paper as it comes through the window makes a subtle gradient.

If I soak the paper in washing soda the image fades. The lightest areas going first. The darkest areas come along much slower. Its possible to pull the images out in the middle of this split. The highlights running away from the shadows. Suddenly the gradient is there.

A second exposure of blue over the top of this gradient brings out the potential of the idea. Two images, both faint and barely there, but combined to make something new.

They look like pastel drawings. Not cyanotypes.

I've done my best to photograph them but I already know they are going to be difficult to capture. They are very quiet images. Reflections of the time in which I made them.

It snowed last night. I woke up to a wet pack of snow two inches deep. When it came down it brought most of the fall leaves with it.

It was a little sad. Bittersweet. I sat there looking out the window thinking about how soon I won't be able to hear the wind in the leaves anymore. Just the dry whistle of winter wind in the bare branches.

With the leaves buried under snow and the grey skies of Cleveland winter it will be time soon to put away to cyanotype materials. Any ambitions will have to rest until spring brings reliable sunshine back.

This could be a source of frustration, but I enjoy it. The second half of fall is like watching a friend pack their moving boxes. Every moment is savored, recorded, stored away.

For an anxious person like myself it's a chance to enjoy what is around me. I spend so much time living in the future in my head getting to stop and take a moment to smell the wet leaves is a respite to my running thoughts.

I think this is part of the reason why I make the work that I do. Good art is about saying the things we don't have words for yet. My cyanotypes are recordings of that fleeting moment when chance, and weather, and time, and personality come together and make something beautiful that will soon pass. Quiet magic gleaned from the edges of suburban lawns.