Well, here we are again. This is the eighth time I’ve looked at an old photo. This is apparently a thing I do now. Why? Because in May of 2024 I read an article that suggested photographers could benefit from looking at their old photos as if they were made by a different person. I was skeptical about the idea, but what the hell…I did it. The notion still seems a wee bit precious to me. But here I am, doing it again.

Two things: first, I don’t recall the exact point of looking at your old photos as if they were made by a stranger. I know it had something to do with how our approach to photography changes over time, but surely that’s a given, isn’t it? In any event, when I look at these old photos, I find I’m mostly thinking about why I shot that particular photo, or why I shot it in that particular way, or what that photo means to me now. None of which, I suspect, is what the author of the article intended.

Second thing: when I decided to do this, I was stymied by the fact that I’d have to actually pick an old photo to look at. How do you do that? I chose a random approach. I pick a random month in a random year and see what catches my eye. I was completely unprepared to have emotions about this stuff. But I do.

Anyway, here we go.

I shot this photo standing up in the back of my brother’s pickup. What you’re seeing here is an anvil cloud. These form when a thunderstorm’s updraft reaches a level of the atmosphere where moisture effectively stops, which causes the storm to spread out horizontally. These sorts of clouds are associated with really severe weather, including hail and tornadoes. As I understand it, when the moist air can’t go any higher, water vapor coalesces and returns to Earth in the form of heavy rain and/or hail. There’s also a lot of wind. A lot of wind.

Light gets really weird during a thunderstorm. The clouds make a huge difference, of course; they shape the angle of sunlight. The air is full of moisture and particulate matter swept up by the wind, so the light gets diffused and often turns into a beautifully ominous bruised color. It’s compelling and lovely and wild and sometimes scary. It’s that savage, unpredictable, astonishing, untamed wildness that makes big storms both lovely and terrifying.

That’s exactly why my brother, Jesse Eugene, and I were there. He’d been a Marine in Vietnam, and a firefighter afterward. There was a stormy wildness in him. A wildness that showed up in most aspects of his life, to be honest. A wildness I’m afraid I encouraged during tornado season. The wildness–and his willingness to give into it–largely ruined his life. There was a part of him that loved the destructive power of fires, and loved facing and beating down that power. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons he loved thunderstorms. I think he probably saw them as a challenge he could face down.

On this particular day, we knew a bad storm was coming and we drove out to meet it. This was just a few miles outside the city. I’d had him stop his pickup at this particular spot because I liked the curve of the road. I got excited when I got out of the vehicle and saw the curve reflected the curve of the anvil cloud. It amused Jesse Eugene when I asked him to turn the truck around so I could include the red roof in a photo. He enjoyed the absurdity of it–of me insisting on posing a pickup truck while a massive thunderstorm was approaching. It soon became too dark and windy to shoot photographs, but we stayed there until the storm hit hard and it began pissing down rain like the End of Days. It was a good storm.

I picked this photo to look at because, even though you can see his face, it’s probably the most honest photograph I’ve taken of my brother. I’m happy with this just as a photograph, even though it’s flawed. I like the way the sunlight behind us illuminated my brother’s white hair. I like the artificial red shininess of the pickup’s roof. I like the way the curve of the road echoes the curve of the clouds. I like the emotion of the image; I like that the emotion is just there and doesn’t depend on the viewer knowing anything at all about the circumstance the people involved. It’s not a great photo, but I think it works.

I’m also happy with it as a memory. I’d much rather remember Jesse Eugene like this, laughing and facing a thunderstorm, rather than the thin, frail, cancer-ravaged person he became at the end. But that’s the thing, I guess. Even the wildest storms eventually lose strength and peter out.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, about a year ago I came 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. The idea seemed a wee bit silly to me, but I was just coming out of a photographic slump…so what the hell, I thought I’d try it.

That slump is long dead now, though I suspect it had more to do with buying a camera that fits my approach to photography than with this practice of looking at old photos. That said, I’ve found some unexpected value in looking at my old photographs. I’m not learning anything new about photography (as I recall, the article was about evaluating or improving your compositional skills or something), but I’ve been surprised to find a weird sense of formality in my photos.

I don’t think of myself as being a formal photographer. I tend to shoot sparingly (I learned photography in the film era, which meant every shot cost money and I was rather poor), but quickly. I’ve been doing this photo stuff long enough that I don’t really think much when it comes to composition. I just put myself or my subject in a position that feels right, then take the photo. While I don’t believe there are any rules that MUST BE OBEYED, I do think there are some very strong photographic suggestions that ought to be considered. For example, if you’re making an informal portrait, you should be reluctant to have your subject strike a pose and you should avoid putting your subject in the center of the frame.

Like this. This is Sakim. I’ll tell you about Sakim in a moment. First, the photo. It’s everything you don’t want in an informal portrait–stiff pose, center of the frame. But (to me, at any rate) it works as a photograph. Why? Partly because of the composition; all the lines direct your eye to him and the angle of his arms matches the angle of the light on the sidewalk. It also works partly because this genuinely represents this particular person at this particular moment.

I was noodling along the riverwalk when I saw Sakim approaching. He was wearing a black baseball cap with smiley faces on it, drinking juice from a soft packet, and walking in a sort of marching gait that I associate with psychiatric patients. I’ve worked with a lot of psychiatric patients, mostly in a prison setting. I’m comfortable encountering them in unscripted public settings. I’ve found folks with emotional issues are often eager to visit with people IF those people are relaxed around them. Of course, the opposite is also true; some folks just want to be left alone. You can’t always tell until you start visiting with them.

I don’t recall how we struck up a conversation, but based on past experience I suspect I initiated it. I do recall he had a soft, gentle, deeply accented voice. We spoke about the weather (it was warm for October, but Sakim said it was chillier than where he was from) and his juice (he didn’t mind that his juice was warm). He wasn’t entirely comfortable having a conversation, but I had the feeling he didn’t really want the conversation to end. My sense was that he didn’t quite know how to have a casual conversation and was always concerned that he wasn’t doing it right.

After a few moments I asked if I could take his photo and he agreed. He took his cap off and stuck it down the front of his pants (which was disappointing–I really wanted him to leave it on, but I didn’t want him to feel like he’d made a mistake by taking it off). Then he struck this awkward pose. He had the sun to his back, which left his face in shadow, so I asked if we could trade places. He struck the same pose again. I told him he could relax. He said he was relaxed. Without lifting the camera to my eye, I recall asking him to take a couple steps this way and that way until it felt like he was in the right position, then I raised the camera and took a single shot. I showed him the photo and thanked him; he said “Okay” or something, then he turned around and went marching off.

Sakim never smiled the entire time we talked. Never showed any emotional affect at all. The entire encounter couldn’t have taken more than 3-5 minutes. I left feeling like I’d sort of failed him somehow.

When I got home and looked at the day’s photos, I almost deleted this one. I was only looking at Sakim and thinking about his awkward attempt to engage with a stranger. It’s NOT a good photo of him. He looks a little sad and distant. But even though it violated my sense of informal portraiture, and even though it’s not a good photo of Sakim, I felt it still worked as a photograph. Despite that, I’m not sure I ever posted it on social media.

If nothing else, this practice of looking at old photographs has reminded me of my 3-5 minutes with Sakim. It’s been almost 13 years. I hope he’s okay.

Right, quick recap: Back in the Spring of last year I was slowly emerging from a photographic funk. I hadn’t picked up an actual camera in…I don’t know, months, Several months. This had happened to me once before (see the endnote if you’re interested). Anyway, for whatever reason, I was coming out of that funk and starting to think about photography again.

That included reading about photography again. I came 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. That seemed ridiculous to me. I’m not terribly interested in my old photos; I mean, I’ve already seen them, right? Why would I want to look at them again, especially when there are lots of photos by other people that I haven’t seen?

But I thought I’d give it a try now and then. This is my fifth time in nine months. I’m still not comfortable in doing this. But several years ago I wrote about Alfred Stieglitz and his notion of practicing in public. The idea, as I interpreted it at the time, is that if you’re serious about photography, you’ve got to be willing show your whole ass in public. So that’s sort of what I’m doing. So, here we go:

The metadata informs me I shot this photo on September 18, 2014 at 9:03 in the morning with my old Fujifilm X10 (ƒ/4.5, 1/450, ISO 200). It’s one of six photographs I shot that misty morning. I tend to be parsimonious when I shoot–a habit from the days when I couldn’t afford to piss away film.

I don’t remember anything about that day, but it’s clear to me why I stopped long enough to take this particular photo. It’s all about those angular lines. The railroad tracks, the dirt road, the rising line of poles, the telephone wires, and that terrifyingly flat horizon line (although I’m living in Iowa, I’m not a country boy, and I’m always a tad freaked out when I find myself in the flattest and most open parts of the Midwest countryside. There’s so much sky and so little to break up the horizon. It always reminds me that I’m on the surface of a planet, which makes me feel incredibly small and unimportant; that’s both humbling and sort of a nice reminder that everything is temporary when seen on a planetary scale).

I’m sort of surprised I didn’t shoot this photo in monochrome. If line and form are the predominant features inside the frame, I tend to opt for black-and-white (okay, yet another tangent, sorry. It’s silly, I know, but I deliberately choose to shoot in either color or in monochrome. I almost never turn a color photo into monochrome, though that process certainly gives the photographer a LOT more control over the final image). I have to assume that at the time I took the photo, I thought the mist-muted colors added something to composition. Maybe it does. I’m not curious enough to process the image in b&w to find out. I mean, this is the photo I chose to shoot, and there it is.

I like this photograph. I think I’d like it no matter who shot it. I like the simplicity of it. I like the balance. I like the emptiness.

So, is there any real value in this whole ‘looking at an old photo’ bullshit? I kind of hate to admit it, but I think there is. I may not be learning anything new, but the practice does reinforce the reality that I see and react to the world differently than regular people. That’s true of all photographers; it has to be. It validates the willingness to stop your car at some random spot, and get out in the chill mist, simply because you’re smitten by a series of visual lines that other folks wouldn’t notice.

So I’ll probably do this old photo business again in the not-too-distant future.

ENDNOTE: My first long-term photographic funk came at the end of my career as a criminal defense investigator. I used my cameras a LOT as a PI, but in a very technical forensic way. The photos I took for my work were all potential evidence to be used in court. The work was very object oriented. The photos were sometimes technically challenging (I once had to photograph the undercarriage of a wrecked car, which involved some tricky lighting and wide angle lenses while lying on a roller beneath the vehicle, which was claustrophobic as fuck). The problem was that there was no joy in that sort of forensic photography. Blood spatter patterns might be visually interesting, but it’s hard to appreciate when you’re shooting them. When I ended that career, I stuffed my cameras into my Sam Spade Conjurer’s Kit and stuck it in a closet, where it sat for about 3-4 years. I had no desire to hold a camera in my hand in all that time.

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.

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.

And I did. Twice, so far. But I have to admit, I’ve failed. I mean, yeah, I looked at a couple of old photos and yeah, I tried to analyze them. But I didn’t analyze them as if some other jamoke shot them. I did try to look at the photos as objectively as I could (and I like to think I succeeded at that), but I couldn’t separate that analysis from my personal awareness of what was happening in the world around me when I shot the photo or my reasons for shooting it.

But, whatever. Here I am, doing it again. I’m just going to ignore the original idea and continue my pattern of…of whatever it is that I’ve done. I’m even creating a new tag: greg looks at an old photo. I’ll probably do this once every month or two. Probably. Anyway, here:

I chose this photograph for two reasons. First, because the Iowa State Fair is underway (I’m planning to attend soon). And second, because it doesn’t quite work as a photo. It almost works. Technically, it’s a tad underexposed. I shot it with my wee Fujifilm X10, which is a fine little camera but it doesn’t allow for quick exposure changes (this was shot at f2.2 at 1/100 and an ISO of 400). If I’d had time, I’d have fiddled with the exposure compensation dial. But that’s the thing about shooting photos that are about people living their lives. They’re not there to be photographed; they’re there because they’re there. You just have to take what’s given. So, underexposed a wee bit.

I’m happy with the basic composition, although the exposure detracts from it. Obviously, the young couple are the primary subject of the photo, but as I approached them I noticed some sort of vacuum/blower device on the floor; it was almost the same color as the top the young woman was wearing. This is where the exposure hurts me; the vacuum thingy gets lost; you can barely see it in the lower left corner of the frame. Still, the quietness of the young couple is, I think, nicely balanced by the other activity in the barn. And I quite like the cow portrait in the upper right of the frame.

So yeah, as a photograph it’s technically flawed, but (I think) well composed. What I really wanted was to depict a moment in the lives of these kids. For almost two weeks, folks from farms all over the state basically live in these massive barns, along with their livestock. They arrive before the fair starts and often don’t leave until after it ends. The Cattle Barn, the Sheep Barn, the Swine Barn, the Horse Barn—they all become small, temporary communities. Over the years, I’ve taken dozens of photos of people in these barns—napping, eating, playing (young barn kids seem to enjoy playing practical jokes on fair-goers), making friends, living a weird approximation of their ordinary lives. There’s something rather sweet about it, something simple (and something rather uncomfortable for those of us not accustomed to barnyard smells). Because they’re only here for a brief time, all these human interactions—the friendships, the squabbles, the romances–become compressed, more immediate.

Another thing about this photo that appeals to me: the transience of these relationships is in marked contrast to the stability of the Fair itself. The Iowa State Fair has been held almost every year since 1854 (they skipped 1898 because of the World’s Fair in Omaha, and missed three years from 1942–1945 because the fairgrounds had been turned into a supply depot for World War II, and the Covid pandemic axed the fair in 2020). It’s been held at this same location since 1886; some of the buildings from the early 1900s are still in use. The barn in which these kids are having their moment was built in 1914.

This particular moment took place in 2016, but you can easily imagine a similar moment in the same barn a hundred years ago. Different fashions, different hair styles, different chair, but the cattle haven’t changed much, and the barn is almost exactly the same. Imagine how many of these moments have happened over the years.

I used to pay a lot of attention to photography. Not just the practice of photography (you know, shooting photos and all that), but photography as a craft and art form. Then, for a lot of reasons, I stopped doing that. For a few years, I just wasn’t interested in photography. I shot occasional photos with my cellphone and that was enough. But a few months ago I picked up one of my old cameras and…hey, guess what. My interest in photography was resurrected.

I started thinking about photography again. I started reading articles about photography again, and studying other photographers again. In doing so, I came across an article that suggested looking at your old photos as if they were made by a different person. I’ve never really bothered to look at my old photos. I saw them when I took them and again when I processed them; why look again? But I thought, “Well, what the hell, I might as well try that.” And I did. I picked an old photo and studied it (and wrote about it here). Now I’m doing it again.

Here’s a thing I learned the last time I did this: looking at old photos–and I mean actively looking at them, not just thumbing through them quickly–is weird. It’s sort of dissociative. At least it is for me. It turns out there’s two or three things going on at the same time. You 1) look at the photo as a photo, an object in its own right. But you also 2) consider what was happening in the world around you when you shot that photo. And 3) you remember why you shot the photo.

This photo was shot on a Sunday evening, at 6:59 PM on the 7th of August, 2011. It was shot at a hospice facility for veterans, where my brother Jesse Eugene was dying from pancreatic cancer. I visited him almost daily during his stay. On that particular day, I’d wheeled his bony ass out to this small enclosed porch so he could look at some trees and feel some sunshine. He stayed in his wheelchair, I sat on the bench. We didn’t talk much. I think the trees and sunshine meant more to me than to him. He may have been humoring me when I suggested visiting the porch. We were only out there a short time before he said he was tired and wanted to return to his room.

I remember wanting to shoot his photo while we were out there; the light was amazing. But he looked awful–the cancer had pretty much ravaged him–and I knew he wouldn’t want his photo taken like that. After I got him back in his bed and comfortable, I scurried back to the porch and took this photo, catching the last little bits of that delicious sunlight.

He died a few days later. This may have been the last time he left his hospice room. I think it was. It’s possible somebody else might have wheeled him out to that porch, but I don’t think so. At the time, it never occurred to me that he might never get to sit in the sunlight again.

Here’s a weird thing. I knew he was dying, but I can’t remember ever thinking something like, “This will be the last time he ever eats black-eyed peas” or “He’ll never get to hear this song again.” I take that back; I vividly recall bringing his dog to visit, knowing it would be the last time he got to hold and hug his little buddy. That was pretty crushing. But that was unusual; mostly I always thought there’ll be at least one more day. But, of course, eventually there wasn’t.

Here’s another weird thing–an uncomfortable weird thing. There’s a selfish part of me that wants this to have been taken on the last day Jesse Eugene sat in sunshine. Why? Because it would give the photo more emotional weight. That complicates my thoughts about this photograph. I have to wonder if my memory is reliable. It’s entirely possible I’m remembering this as the last time my brother sat in sunlight because I want to remember it that way.

Without all that context, I think it’s a pretty good photo. The light is sweet, that yellow bench is an absolute treat, the hint of flowers in the left of the frame is a nice touch. The last rays of sunlight give the photo a sentimental quality that, I hope, isn’t entirely sappy.

I’m still uncomfortable with this idea of examining an old photo of mine, but I’m willing to consider there may be some value in it. I’ll probably do it again in a month or so.

Here’s a thing I’m going to do. Well, it’s a thing I’m thinking I might do. I’m not going to commit to actually doing it because it might be awful–for me and for any poor bastard reading this blog. Anyway, here’s the thing:

I’m thinking I might periodically look at one of my old photos and review or analyze it as if it were shot by a stranger.

I almost never look at my old photos. The very idea of looking at my old photos sounds boring as fuck. The idea of talking about one of my own photos sounds pretentious and annoying (and also boring as fuck). So why am I going to do this? I’ll explain the reasons later. Anyway, here’s the first photo I’ve chosen for this maybe-project.

I shot this one late afternoon in September of 2006 (EXIF data is handy) with my very first digital camera, an Olympus C-770 UZ. A four megapixel powerhouse. It’s shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio, which I’ve never been comfortable with. As I recall, there was an option to shoot in 3:2, but it required some loss in resolution, which was noticeable in a 4mp camera.

I was having coffee with a friend and was somewhat distracted by the pattern of the late afternoon shadows. I recall shooting a couple frames of the shadows, but the images weren’t very interesting. At some point, my friend raised her arm to sip her coffee; the sun had shifted enough to illuminate the edge of the rolled up sleeve of her white shirt. I asked her to do it again and took the shot.

It’s not a great photograph, but that arm and sleeve humanizes the image. It’s not just a photo of some shadows; it’s a photo of a human moment. There’s a palpable mood here–quiet, reflective, casual, conversational. There’s something comfortably relaxed, intimate even, about that rolled up sleeve. I also like the fact that the image is intimate while being sort of impersonal; there’s almost nothing to identify the other person–age, gender, height, weight. It could be anybody. Fill in the blank.

Finally, the perspective puts the viewer IN the scene. Sitting relaxed across at a table with a friend in an almost empty coffee shop on a sunny afternoon.

Okay. Now, why am I talking about this 18-year-old photo? Here’s why.

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about photography. Thinking about different photographers, about styles and trends in photography, about the decision-making processes involved in making photos. For years I wrote a fairly regular series of essays about photographers (which can be found here). I started those essays primarily as a way to educate myself, but they became a tool for discussion in a Flickr group called Utata.

And then I stopped. I could probably cobble together some logical explanation for why I stopped, but really, who cares? The thing is, I just didn’t spend much time thinking about photography and photographers. I continued to shoot photographs, but lackadaisically and rarely with an actual camera. I was satisfied with my Pixel phone. Until a few months ago.

Again, I could probably cobble together some logical explanation for why I picked up a 12-year-old camera, but, again, who cares? I picked it up and started shooting with a camera again. Which led me to start shooting with another of my cameras. Which led me to decide to buy a new camera (which should arrive in a month or so). I’ll write about the new camera when it arrives. But the thing is, I’m thinking about photography again. I’m reading about photography again. And one of the articles I read included some bullshit about reviewing your old photographs.

Here’s a True Thing: I have no real interest in looking at my old photos. The very idea of looking at my old photos sounds boring as fuck. I mean, I shot those photos; I’ve already seen them. I’d rather look at new photos, photos shot by somebody else.

But this article suggested looking at your old photos as if they were made by a different person. The rationale is that we change over time, so our approach to photography probably changes. Which sorta kinda makes sense to me, since in a very real way I’m NOT the same person I was in, say, 2006.

So I said, “What the hell, why not?” and I opened up Google Photos and scrolled all the way down to the oldest photos. The photo above was one of them. It seemed like a good place to start.

I don’t know if this is a good idea or not. I’m not sure I’ll follow through on it. But back in the days when I was actively thinking about photography, I stumbled across some thoughts by Alfred Stieglitz and William Gedney about practicing in public. Although they didn’t put it quite like this, those guys were suggesting that if you’re serious about photography, you’ve got to be willing show your whole ass. Maybe this is related to that whole notion.