Waypoints

These pictures were taken in Japan between 2001 and 2011.

The majority of them are from the early 2000s, back when I was in my mid-20s.

These pictures were at one time “new”- I took them not for the future but for that moment.

But now, I’m struck by how many things in them are slowly starting to look dated – the fashion, the hairstyles, the locations even- so much has changed. That’s just what “now” looked like, then. And in a few years it’ll all look even more “then” than it does now.

I have lived with some of these images for twenty years- and there, every time I see him, that Buddhist pilgrim is forever in mid-stride, looking back at me as I step off a bus in Kyoto on a December morning in 2001. That kid with the ice cream cone is probably now in college but no, look – he’s still there on a sunny street in Kamakura in 2005.  It’s possible that some of the older people in these photographs now exist only as pictures and memories, as we all will for a while one day.

So, as the photographs pile up and the years pass, and here, the pages turn – I feel I’ve come, like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time.

Yet, the only way I can figure out how to deal with this is to simply to keep on taking pictures – creating more of these waypoints that mark out a path through life.

Silver Gelatin Print Available as well HERE