I’m certain I’ve sent this photograph for my newsletter before, but it got a lot of love this past weekend, and I want to revisit it.

Recently I took a manager job at my restaurant. For months I had told myself that if they offered it to me, I wouldn’t take it, for a lot of reasons. But I started to think about what it meant, and ultimately decided I’d be great and that it wasn’t an opportunity I wanted to pass up. This means I have a salary, which is great, but it does also mean I have less free time to spend “doing what I came to New York to do.” That was the biggest drawback. Every time I put out a fire for my work, a new one sparks up, and it hasn’t given me time to catch my breath just yet. I have a new tattoo I want to pick at, I kind of want to run for the hills about everything. But those itches will scratch themselves in time.

If I set time aside to write I will get the writing done, like now. If I set aside the time and money to do the things I want to do (which I can, now, thankfully), they will get done. In the next year I want to do another book. In the next year I want to travel to Europe, alone, and see things I’ve wanted to see basically my whole life. In the next year I want to be able to sit and look out my window like I am now, watch the leaves rustle away in the wind, sit around with my friends and do nothing, listen to new music. While I have my hindrances about this next part of my life I also know how determined I am to make it work out, how I have the capacity to create a solid work environment and self-sustaining store as well as keeping my head over water and enjoying myself. 

And going home to make photographs like this. This was taken right after I visited Lowell’s house the last time, January 2017. I made a few pictures there that ended up in Big Empty (which did not make it to the exhibition), in and amongst the presence of his ashes, and then found myself driving to the Thunderdome in the freezing night. I spent my senior spring shooting the baseball team there, including Lowell. Friday will be three years since he died, unceremoniously, swift, as though none of us had a say in the matter. At times I still feel cheated out of time with him in my life, but I look at this picture, I look at the picture I took of the stars that night, how I spent that long exposing the light, how the camera shifted to cause the stars to fall. And in remembering that, my perspective changes on the whole thing, and I breathe a little easier. 

I took this after the picture of the stars, because the sign at the softball field was easier to juxtapose with the empty parking lot, the cars passing on University Boulevard behind it. I remember watching the cars go by and being excited they’d be in the shot– it’s the first time I captured light quite like that on film. It keeps the fence in the frame, it organizes the visual elements, it’s a highlight key, it drags you through the shroud of darkness around the corners. It’s my favorite part of the picture. 

The great thing is I already know which baseball field I’m going to photograph next.