In my most persistent year’s worth of photography, I walked a lot and I drove all over the Mid-Atlantic looking for landscapes and locations that I wanted to photograph.
The driving part could be tricky. I saw things I very much wanted to photograph but there was absolutely no way to pull over safely and nowhere nearby to park and walk back to what I’d seen. (And sometimes what I’d seen was transient or mutable and would disappear by the time I did—vultures feeding just off the road, a person standing momentarily in dynamic relationship to a built landscape, and so on.)
Sometimes it was a really interesting place but I had a bad vibe about it. I once wandered around in the woods down by what used to be the Franklin Mint Museum southwest of Swarthmore and what is now a massive housing development under construction to photograph some interesting ruined houses. I started smelling a really strong chemical smell, noticed that one of the houses had a satellite dish, some electric lights that were on and some plastic tarp up on the door despite being a ruin and began to feel it was likely a place where meth was being made, so I went the other direction very quickly.
I still saw a lot of interesting places and scenes, not all of which I photographed (and some I photographed poorly).
This shot was taken as I was coming back slowly from having photographed horseshoe crabs coming up to spawn near Slaughter Beach in Delaware. That hadn’t gone all that well because horseshoe crabs are actually not very interesting to photograph—a live one sort of looks like a dead one unless you flip it over and flipped over it just kind of looks messy. I’d tried close shots, even macros (they pretty much ignored you even if you were six inches from them), a wide angle of the 30 or so crabs up and down the beach, some prime lens medium shots, and nothing seemed photographically engaging, though it was an interesting thing to actually see.
So I drove slowly back on rural roads across Delaware. Not too far from the beach, I came across a group of about six houses fairly nearby. And one of them looked like this. The rest were inhabited, seemed in fine enough shape, there were people about. I looked up the house and the area later to see if there was a news story about this, and never found anything. It didn’t seem like random graffiti, certainly. Somebody had feelings—and for that reason I didn’t feel like prowling around looking for the best angle on the shot, given that the odds were fair that the feeling-having people were the ones living in the other houses who were already giving me a look just for stopping.
Sometimes you take a photo and the photo suggests a story that’s false—there’s a juxtaposition of people that is a perspectival illusion, not an unfolding narrative. You capture a facial expression that looks like a wicked smile but is actually a developing sneeze. But sometimes you see a story that’s real, and know that you’ll never know more about it.