I was at an expat lunch at someone’s house the other day here in Nairobi. As it turned out, several people there had various ties to the Washington DC area. I was saying that when I was back last time in April-May, I was expecting a dystopia but had actually enjoyed it despite everything.
“Well, you might get your dystopia now,” one woman said. Indeed.
I won’t do a deep dive into what’s going on. You know what’s going on. How I feel about it won’t shock anyone, nor vary much from how you feel. No need for me to go on and on.
Instead I decided to make my response in the form of a photo post. Fairy Tales from the Fault Lines is my long-term project from the 2010’s. It started as sort of naive photos taken with my first iPhones (4/5) when I was out and about in DC with my young daughter, mostly within walking distance of home or work. No story, purely random, driven only by instinct. Over time it became more of a personal documentary series on changing DC neighborhoods. The real city where people live. I wasn’t sure where those changes would eventually land, and how I felt about them, but I’ve always thought places are most interesting in times of transition. In DC’s case, especially in what I called the city’s ‘fault line’ neighborhoods like Petworth (where we lived for many years), Columbia Heights, U Street, and Shaw - where the different sides of a long-segregated city intersected and mixed in new ways.
DC is where I was born and where I grew up. Over what feels like many lives there I’ve fallen in and out of love with the city plenty of times. Most recently *out*, if I’m being honest. The city has certainly gotten more slick and expensive - I used to say many areas where you used to be afraid to walk you can’t afford to live in now. It’s gotten ‘better’ in some ways compared to the sleepy dereliction of my youth, but lately I’ve had a harder time finding my place in it. Maybe that’s just the way it goes.
When I took these pictures, however, it felt great and I was in full enchantment mode as a new father. I remember a dream I had at the time, finding myself walking around the DC of maybe the 1940s or 50s - my parents’ DC - and a feeling of deeply loving it all washing over me. The buildings, the alleys, the people, even as I tried to avoid detection as a time-traveler. While I never got my Fairy Tales book off the ground, I did get a lot of mileage out of it through various exhibitions and artist talks. Some of the work was published in the Washington Post Magazine in 2015 along with my short first-person text (check it out here, and a different version on the Nat Geo photo blog here).
I remember writing that mainly I was trying to find out if I could love the city as I had loved other cities. The Post editor actually pressured me a bit to end on an affirmative note in that regard. The best I could do was a kind of “we’ll see”.
That was ten years ago, hard to believe how things have in fact ‘landed’ after all. Of course where we’re still heading is unwritten, talk about uncharted territory. This is just a short selection I pulled together with current events in mind. It’s a sizable body of work overall, I might post a second round later. Interesting that while I used to see the images as bottling a particular time period, now they also represent the ‘before times’. And of course a layer of nostalgia for that phase of my own life.
(I also added them to my prints gallery for anyone interested. Since some of them were relatively small files from the phone camera, I’m only offering modest print sizes.)
The project is an homage to the city I’ve loved and will always defend, but which may never be the same after the current occupation. I’m working on a new song about it too. Stay strong my DC peeps, this is becoming quite a dark fairy tale, more Grimm by the day. Somehow we’ll get through it together. I was glad to see the impromptu go-go show at the corner of 14th and U the other day. More like that please.
I just added my DC resistance t-shirt, modeled after ACDC’s logo, to my store. Available in a few different colors, mainly kind of earth tones for now, I might add other colors in the future. I tried to make them something a grownup would want to wear. Notice it’s branded with the logo I use, which is a graphic symbol for a resistor (with an ‘o’, the electrical component). See what I did there. There’s a another little backstory on it but I’ll spare you for now.
