Day One

Six years and I have never once brought a camera downtown to take photos. In a lot of ways, I have always thought that its kind of a boring, gross, dusty, and annoyingly inaccessible downtown city center. I hate driving down there and basically refuse to do so. I always forget that I can just take the B line train from Westminster to downtown in about ~11 minutes. I did it from time to time for work, generally the 1.76 mile walk from home to the station in the summer heat was enough to stop me from doing that to much.

So last night I went for a little golden hour photo walk just to burn some time and get out of a weird headspace I was in. It is kind of how I ended up with the idea of doing this project. I didn’t feel like walking around a ton and mostly just did a few blocks around Union Station. It has been a while, maybe a year or more since the last time I stepped foot in there or walked in that part of downtown. A lot changes and a lot stays the same. Being down there gave me some ideas for portraits I would like to shoot in the future and the location will likely show up again in this blog.

A Project in Progress

I have been in Denver for just about six years now. It feels like at least half of that time I have been in a love hate relationship with the area. There are stretches of time when I love it, I love living in Denver, and longer stretches when I don’t and I think about moving somewhere else. I think the reality is that Denver is not home long term. It’s home now, but within a couple of years it will become another place I once lived. I still have some time left here, maybe two years or so if I had to guess. In that time I want to make a photo book for myself that acts as a representation of my thoughts and feelings about this place that I have called home throughout my late twenties and early thirties.

I also want to have this space on my website to post images that could potentially appear in that photo book one day. I have increasingly come to dislike social media and really don’t care for posting photos on Instagram, Threads, Reddit, or anyplace else. I miss writing and hope that this space will be a fun place to document days, weeks, photos, places, and memories of my time here.

At the end of the day I want to look back at the work and ask the question “Would this photograph help someone understand what living here felt like to me?" So some things will probably be mundane. The places I visit, the routes I take, where I take the dogs, where I meet people, where I spend my time, the things I find beautiful and the parts I genuinely dislike.