I struggled to see the familiar with fresh eyes. I fall into habits easily, visiting the same places and photographing the same things over and over again. There can be value in that, deeply knowing a thing as you watch it change over time, but get too familiar and you stop seeing anything, you look without looking, like that painting still leaning against the wall that you meant to hang three weeks ago, now it just lives there, or failing to notice when you partner gets a new haircut.
I felt that way during these photographs of week. It started out rainy and the joy at the ever earlier light was tempered by the fact on Sunday Daylight Savings Time would set the sunrise back again and it would be another 31 days before it attained the same early hour again.
So then it was again trips up to Kerry Park and along the Elliott Bay Trail, Pike Place Market looking for an interesting perspective, old trucks under streets light and vintage cars on Ballard Avenue.
I hadn’t visited Carkeek Park in a long while and after stopping along the way to remember childhoods playing in the sand and dirt with Tonka trucks, found that the bridge over to the beach had become infected with the disease of love locks.
Ballard Locks and Discovery Park are warm blankets, with the blue herons beginning to nest.
The only thing that really interested this week was the cleaner in Kings Hardware, the big windows leaking warm light onto the sidewalks empty of people, Mexican music playing over the speakers, spilling out into the street as I pedal by, bars in early mornings feel like secrets, liminal spaces, like early mornings, seeing the world with beginners eyes.
