I wanted to give you a little more behind the scenes info about the images inspired by my play memory story: Edgewood School and Bronx River. It also dovetails nicely with explaining more about my process, and how I ended up making images by photographing them off an ipad.

"When I was in sixth grade, and it was nearing the end of the school year and had just started to get warm, one of the boys told us that there was a secret rope swing down near the village, over the Bronx River. So after school all of us, boys and girls together, walked the mile and a half to the woods to see if it was true. And it was. Right there, close to the railroad station but completely hidden. We spent the afternoon swinging over the river, which was more like a creek, and had the most glorious time.

This memory felt like both the end and the beginning of something. We were all about to graduate from elementary school and head off to junior high. The playing itself was exciting yet familiar, but socializing with the boys like this felt tentative and new."

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to make images inspired by childhood play memories, but the challenge was how to do that. How do you photograph a memory? For those of you who have been following my work for a while, you know that for my last project, Grief Landscapes, I solved that problem by photographing a meaningful object in extreme close-up and transforming it into a landscape.

Originally I thought I would do the same with Play Passages. And I started with my story about the rope swing. I had the idea that I would get a piece of rope and use a similar process.

But very quickly, I realized it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t really a story about a rope. It was a story about a journey, a place, and a feeling.

Inspired by a book I read by Jill Berry, called Map Art, I became inspired to visit the location of my play memory on Google Earth. If you’ve never used Google Earth, you really have to try it. You type in an address, and then fly through the air, closer and closer in until you get to your destination. It's kind of magical.

So I went on Google Earth and flew to my elementary school, where we first heard the rumors about the rope swing. And I literally got the chills. So many memories flooded back as I circled around the building, looking at it from different angles.

I knew I wanted to transform it somehow, so I got out my macro lens, which allows me to photograph things up close, and just played around with it; first photographing the computer screen, and then realizing that by pulling up the image on an ipad, I could lay it flat, and warp the original image in more interesting ways.

The second image was more challenging. Google Earth and StreetView won’t let you see into the woods, it can only show you satellite images of the trees or what a car with a camera on top can see from the road. I originally did shoot an image of the woods from the angle of the Bronx River Parkway, which is the highway which runs next to the woods, and for a while I thought that was the image I would use for the second part of the story. I do really love it.

But after a while, I realized that it didn’t really have much to do with the story, and I went searching online for images of the Bronx River itself. Like the image of the Burlington garden I talked about the other day, I had to take artistic license. The image I found of the Bronx River is not of the exact spot of the rope swing, but it evoked it for me.

As I started making more images from other people’s stories, I also questioned whether it made sense to have two images from my story while the rest have just one. But again, I decided to be flexible—my story was about a journey, and I wanted one of the beginning and one of the end.

I also want to stay open to making however many images I need to inspired by the stories all of you send me. So keep them coming! This is all just the beginning.

Press

Blog