It’s funny to log back on to this site and see a post from many years ago with more than 7000 notes. Someone sent me a message asking if it’s my image. It is. The relative success of this image is ironic. Whereas this blog featured my photography, this particular image is not a photograph I carefully composed, shot, and edited. Rather, it is a collage of end-of-the-roll prints from pharmacies and photography stores that processed my colour film canisters. These always amused me because the colours and patterns are simultaneously random but also similar. Coming back to this blog, I realize that it came to a natural end but I never signed off. Now seems like a good opportunity to end with a conclusion.
Photography was a way of coping with depression, anxiety, and loneliness in grad school. The photos in this blog reflect many of those experiences. Solitary hours spent wandering through cities with a camera, pouring over photo books in the library, processing film at the university film club dark room, and sitting at a computer scanning and editing in the middle of the night are reflected in landscapes which are -- both purposefully and as a consequence of my process -- mostly devoid of human presence. Apart from a few photographers I followed and interacted with on here, I never made any friends doing photography. It was a retreat. Space for processing, meditation, and reflection. Many things happened over the course of the blog. My parents got divorced and sold the family farm. The photos of the farm were mostly taken on my last visit, after my mother had left, before the farm was sold. The new owner burned down the farmhouse shortly after taking over the property in what we suspect was insurance fraud. Those photos were an attempt to understand my relationship to the property and what had happened to my family. My brother, mom, and dad all live separately now and do not talk to each other (or even have each others contact info). I never had any major quarrels with any of them. I floated through the existence and eventual demise of my family as a casual observer, like an astronaut watching a supernova in slow motion. My grandfather died. He was my original motivation to become a photographer. He gave me my first camera; a Pentax Mx. He worked most of his life as a forester in British Columbia and documented the experience with his camera. Later on he became a college instructor and used his catalogue of slides as teaching material. (His forestry photos can be viewed on the college webpage: http://www.openingnewcaledonia.ca/pls/cats_web/WEB_EXHIBITIONS.show_exhibit?EXHIBIT_ID=329&LANG=EN) There’s a series of black and white photos from my last visit to BC before he passed. The last few posts show some of the friends I made in grad school and the girl I married. After I finished grad school we moved to Switzerland for a postdoc (we’ve since returned to Canada). Europe was full of photos, but I didn’t take many. I guess I didn’t need to anymore.