One cannot step in the same river twice
I moved to Baltimore in August 2015 to start my MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Despite studying graphic design, I arrived to my new town with a renewed interested in photography and spent a lot of my free time during the two years I lived in Baltimore by walking the streets trying to hone my eye and refine my photographic aesthetic. I remember walking every day my first week there — classes hadn’t started and I didn’t know anyone yet — with headphones in my ears and my camera around my neck. Parked outside my apartment building was a red MG convertible from the mid-seventies. It’s one of the first photos I made in Baltimore:
Over the next two years, I’d see the car again and again, parked in different spots across the few blocks around my apartment. I wouldn’t see it every day. I never saw anyone get in or out. It’d just show up and vanish. I don’t know who owned it or where they lived but most times that I saw it, I’d make another photo. It became a ritual of sorts, a marking of time across my studies.
In an essay from January 2017 — the first month of my last semester at MICA — Teju Cole considers the photography of William Christenberry, a photographer who often returned to the same locations, making the same photograph over and over, creating a series where the appearances were subtly changed year after year. Cole writes:
What is different is not the subject but the time it was photographed. Looking at such a series confirms that when you make one photograph and, some time later, make another of the same thing, what is inside the frame changes. With the passage of time, you no longer have “the same thing.”
This is what I see in my series of this MG convertible: the passage of time. Imperceptible to the viewer, I see the passage of seasons and the evolution of my own work. The car surrounded my snow reminds me of being deep in my own thesis.
Over the last few years, I’ve returned to Baltimore each December to serve as a visiting critic to the current thesis students in the program I graduated from. I still bring my camera and make a point to spend some time photographing my old haunts. Last week, walking my old street to get to campus from my hotel, I passed that car again. I made yet another photo of it. I made a mental note to myself that I photographed it the first time a decade ago. Then I made another note, recalling Cole’s essay: it is not the same car. And I am not the same person.
