So, yeah, our home service was down for the day.
The line on photography from Susan Sontag that’s become famous—justifiably so—includes the idea that photography is trying to preserve moments in time, rather than envision a scene or place as an artist can imagine it. Photographers who start to invest in their sense of being artists start to try to get out from under it. (Historians, on the other hand, are content to have photographers pile up their work as evidence, often at the cost of the aesthetics of the images compiled into archives.)
But I am struck as my own archive accumulates how much of it are things I can never see again. Most obviously people caught in one moment of their lives who will be older, absent, different the next time I see them. People doing things they will never do again—I bitterly regret that I haven’t been out in public over the last two years documenting the pandemic scenes that I will now remember.
But also places that will never be as they were. This scene was along Route 1, aka Baltimore Pike, not far from what used to be the Franklin Mint Museum, an odd, distinctive, ugly building whose collection ceased to be relevant about 30 years ago. It was an abandoned area where all summer along locals gathered at a swim hole on Chester Creek, where there was a spot along an abandoned light rail line that if you passed it on a hike you could tell it was where local teenagers gathered to drink illicitly at night after swimming, where there were ruined, abandoned houses all through the woods, at least one of them a place where people were making meth.
I’m not going to say I miss it—when I took this shot, I hiked further through the woods and at the aforementioned meth house, I’m guessing I got pretty close to getting into serious trouble, since I thought it was just a ruin until I got much closer than I should have. Today the entire area is a massive housing development and a huge transit site reviving a light rail station that closed in 1986. Everything I photographed that day is completely and utterly gone as if it never was. We see things that become dreams—I doubt, in the days of its ruin, that more than the teenagers, the meth makers, myself and other curious hikers and explorers went along the abandoned line and through the woods to see what can no longer be seen.