The cursor had gone still, and I knew I had a problem. Here I was, draft finished on the Train Dreams post, but the images were locked away on a roll of film that had about 24 exposures left to go. How could I post without the illustrations to drive the words? The images have to be at least half the point of this whole thing. I had no idea when I might finish the roll and have the pictures developed. I might need to go back to shooting digital if I want to blog again. Who could say when I might find 24 moments interesting enough to activate the shutter?

I started shooting pictures to post online back in high school. When I wasn’t paintballing, I was on paintball forums. I could see that users would post pictures of themselves and their friends to gain status, and I wanted that, so I started shooting. Those pictures turned into party pictures for Facebook around the end of high school. 

I started my first personal blog in October of 2009. The initial post featured a series of 35mm photos I shot on a toy twin lens reflex Blackbird Fly in New Haven when my family went to move my sister in for her last year of college. The initial posts are photo dumps without context. They meander around for a couple of months and then stop when I pick up on a different blog with the girl I had just started dating. I returned to photoblogging on Tumblr with this website’s namesake in April 2011, and that’s when I really got serious.

I carried my camera around with me almost everywhere in New York. There were so many moments to capture. I wanted to cut up and rearrange the city, take my part in it, and communicate the world I saw day-to-day. At one point, I was posting two pictures a day. They weren’t all special, but I have a fondness for the story that they tell in aggregate. I didn’t have any rules or ideas about what I was shooting. It was just “see something interesting – make the image”. I wasn’t creating a body of work; I was collecting moments of interest.

I kept posting hard through 2015. I was having a tough winter in New York, and going out on walks to take pictures became a good way to keep myself from stewing. When I didn’t know what to do with myself, which was often, I would just start walking and see where I went. I shot the East Village so frequently I had memorized every inch, so I kept expanding outward. I made it up and up, all the way into the 90s at times.

At the same time, I was working at Aperture, seeing a deluge of lovingly crafted photos every day. By night, I was endlessly scrolling Tumblr, Flickr, and Dump.fm, letting my mind soak in infinite images. I stopped taking joy in translating the moments. I would see something in the real world and in my mind I was already scrolling past it on an endless feed. The inspiration stopped being inspiration, the spark was gone. I still shoot frequently, but I haven’t quite felt the same since.

When I look at these photos, I can see some of the impulses alive, and I remember: “it’s time to touch grass”.