I walk out of the office tonight and it’s drizzling a little and after working an extra couple of hours, confined in the office space, I find it hard to warm up as I walk.
“Just stop thinking about being cold you’ll stop being cold” says my internal coach. Of course it’s the lights reflecting off the wet streets that distract me from the chill a minute or two later.
It’s dark by this time and it occurs to me that I'm starting to look differently at the people I encounter at night - I'm enamoured with the shadowy shapes of them. I’m not sure if that's a good thing - seeing their shapes and not their faces, but it's firing my imagination these days. It’s as if I'm seeing them as part of the moving, breathing city. I imagine that the shapes of now are walking in tandem with those of the past; as if I’m encountering many generations of life upon these sidewalks, from there behind those walls.
My imagination isn’t working alone. In the past number of weeks I’ve been looking at a lot of my city’s archived photos, which somebody has been posting on Facebook. I’ve always liked to look at old pictures, to travel time through them. But the experience of looking at old images of this city – in particular the streets I walk every day; those which I’ve been looking at closely and photographing for my photo journal project – has given me cause to locate myself amidst the strata of time.
The figures in those pictures - some 30 years ago, some 50, some more than 100 years ago - have, in my mind, begun to simmer together like the chemicals that once caused an image to emerge on paper. Ghostly like. Lurking at every corner of my consciousness. As they should.
I get close to home and the winter feels good.
