You Can Only Meet Your Own Back Catalogue

On moving back to a city you have already photographed

Every photograph I am posting this week is one I took before I left New York.

The Staten Island Ferry. Bethesda Terrace. Snow in Midtown. Somebody on the subway. All of them unmistakably New York, all of them mine, none of them new.

I moved back to New York, and I had assumed that returning to a city you know would feel like picking something up where you put it down. It doesn’t. You don’t move back to a city as a photographer. You meet your own back catalogue. And that’s not a comfort. It’s a bar.

My wife and I run a nomadic gallery, ankydyn, so I spend a lot of time around artists, and I have never met one who thinks their old work is safe. You like it on Monday. By Thursday you can list what’s wrong with it. You are only ever as good as the thing you just made, and everything before that gets reassessed in light of whatever you have learned since. There are photographs of mine I remember taking and thinking, I can’t believe I took that. It takes about six months for that to turn into: what was I thinking when I took that!

So the pictures I made here before I left don’t reassure me. They set a standard on days I may have been lucky, and now I have to clear it.

Then there is the year in between New Yorks. I spent most of it on beaches. Miami first, and then the coast around Dublin and in England when I went back. Sand, water, weather, people at the edge of the sea. Good work, I think, though see above.

And here is what I have been telling myself since: that a year of that has made me forget how to be a street photographer in a city.

Which is nonsense, and I know it is nonsense, because it’s the same method. Same walking, same waiting, same watching for the second when a scene arranges itself and then comes apart again. I didn’t lose the skill. I lost the context, and I have been treating one as though it were the other.

It’s worth saying how long I have been back. Not long. Barely any time at all. I also started a full-time job, which is a perfectly good excuse I would like to use and can’t, because the fear did not wait for a reasonable interval before turning up. It was here more or less since the day I picked up a camera.

A month ago I had one day in Nice at the end of a work week and nearly spent it in a cafe answering email. I wrote about that last week. I went out instead, walked the old town, and at some point stopped hunting and started seeing, and could not work out why anyone would spend a day any other way.

I thought that had settled something.

It settled nothing. The same feeling was waiting for me here, in the city I know best, in front of the work I already made.

So these photographs aren’t a portfolio this week. They’re evidence. Proof that I lived here before, walked these streets before, made things I was pleased with before.

Which turns out to be no reassurance whatsoever.

Going out with the camera anyway is the only way to push past that.

You can treat me to a coffee or buy my prints.

Thank you for reading. Until next time.