One photograph. One story.
Looking Through Photographs
The ordinary photographs of House 173, and the stories hiding inside them
One Photograph, One Story is a House 173 series built around a simple idea: take one ordinary photograph and follow the story hiding inside it.
It started with a tree.
At least I think it did.
I was looking through some old photographs of House 173 one afternoon, searching for a picture of something or other, when I stopped at one I had probably seen a hundred times.
There was the thing I'd been looking for.
But suddenly I wasn't looking at it anymore. I was looking at the tree behind it.
Look how small that tree was.
Then I noticed something else.
There's that old planter.
And over in the corner was something I hadn't thought about in years.
I'd forgotten we had that.
Pretty soon I'd completely forgotten what I had been looking for in the first place.
I just sat there looking at the photograph.
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| 1998. Thought I was photographing a renovation. Turns out I was photographing our life. |
That's when it occurred to me that photographs are funny things.
We point a camera at one thing, but the camera doesn't know what we're interested in. It saves everything. The tree in the background. The chair on the porch. The neighbor's car across the street. The color we once painted the kitchen and would now prefer everyone forget.
It keeps all of it.
And then it waits.
Twenty years later, you come back looking for one thing and discover a dozen others.
After nearly three decades at House 173, we have thousands of photographs like that. Some document big projects and important changes. But increasingly, I'm finding myself interested in the things we weren't trying to photograph at all.
So I thought we'd start looking at them together.
I'm calling the new series One Photograph, One Story.
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| Winter 2026. Not an old photograph. Someday it will be. |
Sometimes we'll pull out an old photograph. Sometimes we'll look at one I took yesterday, because the ordinary things surrounding us today are quietly becoming old photographs while we're busy living in them.
There doesn't have to be a project.
Nothing has to be repaired, restored or painted.
Although knowing me, something will probably need painting.
We'll just pick a photograph, look closely and see where it takes us.
Maybe we'll notice an old tool. A window that's no longer there. Something piled on the back porch. A tree that used to be six feet tall.
Or maybe we'll find nothing more important than a blue sky seen while lying on the porch floor beside a beagle.
That's enough.
So come along.
Every so often, we'll pull out another photograph and see what it remembered for us.
I suspect there will be quite a few:
Oh, look at that.
I remember that.
And probably more than a few:
Good grief. What were we thinking?
One photograph. One story.
I hope you'll follow along.
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| Choose one. There's probably a story in it. |
Thanks for stopping by - see ya' next time!
