January 11, thePhotoProject
To gather images for each one of these days blogs, I go through my archives in Amazon Photos. If a particular day of a year shows little or no results, I delve into my Google Photos archive that has some of the ‘missing’ images. I am discovering that most of the images were taken on some iteration of the iPhone, thus the quality of them is a bit rough. Some ‘painting’ in Lightroom using a few favorite presets as my baseline gets them closer to how I want them displayed.
2013 Somewhere near Padua, Italy
2014 Arcella, Italy
2015 Padua, Italy. The asian woman in the distance was a constant presence every day for many, many years. She sat and mindlessly scribbled on piece of paper. At one point, Roberto and I bought her a bag of groceries and with him helping translate, I tired to give her a gift of some staples. But she would not accept. Clearly, she had some cognitive issues. I found myself over the years hoping to glimpse her. I have only a few photos I’ve taken, and I think at one time she figured prominently into one of my poems.
2016 Arcella, Italy
2017 The streets of Naples, Italy
2018 Near Padua, Italy. This hat. The story… purchased in San Francisco months before I left the United States and began this continuing odyssey which I now just call my life. Through heat and cold, rainstorms and snow, through airports and cities, this hat was my emblem. It emboldened me to take the risks of seeing new places. It was a prop to capture attention from kids in asian destinations. It survived being crushed hundreds of times. Finally, in 2022, at home in Denver, it finally succumbed to irreversible reshaping that left it resembling road kill. A fitting ending, perhaps. Because on the road it lived. And back in 2022 when I thought I could once again lived a ‘normal’ suburban life, my emblem forwarded me in its last gasp, that this life would never again be for me.
2019 Somewhere near Yorkshire, United Kingdom
2020 Padua, Italy
2021 Ipanema Beach, Brazil
2022, CDMX, Mexico
2024 DaNang, Vietnam
