I spent most of my time in New York walking.
Central Park in the afternoons, bagels in the mornings, and stretches of time wandering with a camera with nowhere particular to be. Lately, I've been spending more of my free time this way. I tend to recharge by doing this, I am a true introvert to say the least.
I was in the city with my husband while he attended a training, and after it had ended, I stayed a couple extra days to visit an old friend in Chelsea.
We grew up together along the California coast. We often would ride our bikes to the beach on Sundays, walking through farmers markets and admiring local artists in the Cedros design district. Our brothers would seem to end up in the same classes, and at that time in my life I photographed her from time to time. Back then, my camera lived somewhere between a drawer in my closet and at the bottom of my backpack that was littered with specs of sand. You'd actually also find it held together with duct tape because the battery chamber no longer worked..but that's another story for another time.
At the time, I photographed pretty much everything. The ocean, the sidewalks, friends sitting in the driveway after sunset. Most of it felt ordinary.
Years later, those photographs feel anything but that.
When I arrived in New York, I just brought one camera with me. It was a gift from my grandmother who had given it to me a week prior along with many other old pieces of photography equipment which had been my late grandfathers. (fun fact she told me...he was the president of his local photography club in San Diego during the 1970's. I thought this was cool and made me smile.)
ANYWAYS, it felt like the exact thing I needed to bring on the trip. This was a camera older than both my friend and I that had somehow followed us into our later years into adulthood.
We spent the afternoon walking through Chelsea.
The scenery couldn't have been more different from where we grew up. We traded cliffs for brick buildings, palm trees for fire escapes, and taxi horns instead of waves. A new kind of charm, but nevertheless both so iconic.
The feeling was somehow familiar despite those altered factors.
Looking through the glass viewfinder, I found myself photographing the same person I had photographed years ago, only now in a different city, at a different stage of life. The photographs felt less like recreations and more like continuations. The story hadn't repeated itself, it was blossoming somewhere new.
When I got the film developed later, I realizxed that whawt I was drawn to wasn't necessarily New York itself. It was the way certain people can connet you with pieces of your past to your present. The negatives felt nostalgic, not because they looked old. They felt nostalgic becuase they held traces of multiple versions of our lives at once: childhood and adulthood, California and New York, memory and reality sharing the same time frame.
For a long time, I thought nostalgia belonged to places.
Now I'm not so sure. Maybe it belongs to people.
