I may be somewhat off-cycle in the next few weeks, because I’m putting the final touches on syllabi for the fall (there’s always a last-minute tuning) and because I’m really bearing down on some long-form writing. But also because I’m going to push some things into this space that don’t quite fit the weekly pattern I’ve built, including a lengthy response to Peter Turchin’s book End Times.
Anyway, this is a photo I quite liked from a quiet night-time walk across the campus of Swarthmore College over winter break about ten years ago. The one thing that frustrates me about the shot is that if I’d taken it in a slightly different spot, I think it would give less of an impression of being tilted. (I’ve tried to rotate the frame a teeny bit and no matter how I do it, you still get that impression because of the subtle elevation shifts in the mid-ground and the weaving of the central path.)
Right now this particular scene is a huge construction mess, a maze of fenced-off paths and areas. That’s the way it goes on a campus, especially one with sound finances: there’s always maintenance, there’s always new projects, there’s always remodeling. It’s odd how much the memory sometimes wants to take you along a path that no longer exists, or expects a building that’s gone in some cases, and in others, it’s nearly impossible to remember even recently-gone buildings or landscaping, maybe just because there wasn’t anything that pleasant or familiar about them in their old form.
I wonder a little too whether wandering around hereabouts with a camera, especially at night, would work these days—in the year I was taking pictures for a kind of daily journal of work, it felt as if the project was happening in a community where everybody kind of knew everybody and folks knew who I was and what I was doing and were genuinely pleased and interested in the outcomes—I used to post images of the campus to Flickr and there were a number of students and staff who did so as well. (A few of the students in that era were stupendously talented photographers who continue to incorporate photographic work into their present professional lives.) I am sure it is true in many other communities (including places that aren’t colleges or universities) that the pandemic sort of broke that sense of mutual presence, but I think everywhere there’s also been the growth of a kind of presumptive skepticism about other people generally, a sort of e-strange-ment that might make it paradoxically easier to witness and photograph places when you are not on your home grounds. But perhaps I am here also just too wrapped up in the doubts and hesitancies that sometimes overwhelm me at this point in my life.