Okay, why am I looking at one of my old photographs? I explained all this back in May, but to recap quickly, I happened across an article on some photo website that suggested looking at and analyzing your old photos as if they were made by a different person. Although that idea strikes me as silly, I thought I’d try it.

This is me, still trying it–although, to be honest and transparent, this is also me trying like hell NOT to think about a future under Trump Unbound. So, the photo.

Okay, see that dog, barely visible in the upper left hand side of the frame? That dog was my main interest. It was Saturday morning, we were at the local farmers market (which actually has a policy discouraging dogs, but that policy is almost universally ignored, for which I’m grateful). I keep my eye out for dogs at the farmers market because dogs do unpredictable things. Unpredictable things can make good photographs. Unpredictable things in a crowd, even better.

I shot this with my cellphone, using a dedicated monochrome app (well, that’s not entirely true; it was a general photography app that I’d set up as my dedicated b&w app). So I opened the app as I approached the dog. That’s when I noticed the two couples in front of me separate so a man could pass between them. I instinctively snapped a quick frame, then went back to concentrating on the dog.

The dog apparently didn’t do anything unpredictable or interesting, because I have no other photo of that dog. Later, when I downloaded the photos, I was drawn to the photograph above, but I didn’t give it much thought. There was nothing farmers-markety about it, so it didn’t hold my attention. But I kept going back to it. There’s something about the arrangement–ten feet forming a sort of arc; eight feet walking away, two feet walking toward the viewer. Maybe it’s the balance. Or maybe it’s the implied movement, the sense of coming and going, of people fluidly making way for others. I’m sure I posted this photo online in some venue, but I’m not curious enough to track it down.

Why did I choose this photo to re-examine today? I don’t know. Maybe I picked this particular photo to look at on this particular day because it offers a hopeful metaphor. It feels like everything in the world right now is somehow going away, and I’d like to believe that at some point in the future all that ‘going away’ feeling will part and allow something good to get through.

That sounds a lot like bullshit, doesn’t it. It probably is. Like I said at the beginning, the idea of looking your old photos as if they were made by a different person seems silly. Maybe I just need a bit of silliness today.