16th Street Mall

The weather was gorgeous Saturday. I woke up and did a nice bike ride from Westminster to Golden and back, reminiscing on old podcasts, re-listing to some Art of Visuals pods from ~2017 and feeling inspired once again after getting through the Shortstache episode.

I had a couple of hours to burn and decided to grab my camera and head downtown to give another go at shooting in some harsh light. I took the B line downtown and figured I would walk past where our old office used to be and head to 16th street mall. I hadn’t seen it since before a lot of the work on it started or finished? I don’t really know what the state of the street is.

I was pleasantly surprised to see there was a Vintage clothes event going on for a few blocks down 16th street and found a Chambray shirt I have been patiently looking for for a while now. Snapped a few pictures a long the way and went back towards home. I had a little bit of time to wait for my train and remembered how weird I thought the escalators underneath Denver Central Station was and it really does give Backrooms vibes.

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.