Found: pictures taken as a high school student. These are of Thayer Street in Providence, RI, and its attendant environs. Based on certain visual cues and simple math, I’m dating these to Spring of 1994, probably April. In those days, Providence was a strange place– still reeling from the Bush I recession & packed with freaks and anarchists as far as the eye could spy. I’m not sure exactly when the city started changing– somewhere towards the end of the decade– but I remember returning from Distant Locales in the Summer of 2001 and being completely and utterly flabbergasted. It was so clean. I moved back in 2003 & it was good times, mostly, but it’s no surprise that it didn’t take. Like the cliché says: you can’t really ever go home again.

Unlike many of the photographs proffered on this very website, these have a certain historical resonance; a combination of awful 90s clothing (was any decade ever so horrid?) and buildings and views of Thayer Street that have disappeared forever. I question the idea of photography as an art, but there’s no denying that every photo becomes interesting after ten years. The archival, representative nature predominates.