One Thousand Days!

This is post number one thousand! I never really thought about this when I began this blog. It was just something I wanted to do, and so I started the blog, and never really thought about the future. My first post was February 3, 2007, and it was a series of 14 photographs from my trip to San Angelo, Texas. I was still working at the time, and wanted the discipline of looking for another kind of photograph, besides my images for the paper. Little did I know that 13 months later I would no longer be working for the paper. Once I left, I discovered that this blog was SO important to me, in making me feel like I was still a photographer. It is about the looking. Every day, day after day after day, I am looking, all the time. Everywhere I go, I am looking for photographs, knowing that at the end of the day, I NEED a photograph for the blog. It has been such an incredibly rich experience. I am so glad I began this project, and I will continue, because it is so important to me. About this photograph: I thought to celebrate the milestone, I would post one of my favorite photographs from a self-assigned project which had a working title of "The Architecture of Despair." It was about abandoned mental hospitals on Long Island. I shot the photo essay with 4x5 black and white film, and I have some wonderful photos from the project. This was the lead photo for the story, and it was the opening spread in the magazine, running across two pages. I will tell you one thing about how this came about. I was walking around the empty building, and found this curving hall with all the peeling paint, and thought that maybe there was a shot here, but I couldn't seem to find it. I walked to the end of the hall, and hadn't found "the" shot, so I turned around to walk back, and stopped in my tracks! My feet had kicked up dust from the floor, and the dust in the air made these wonderful beams of sunlight visible. It knocked my socks off!