Muskegon, Michigan;

For the first 10 years of my life Muskegon was a place to drive through. My parents had a cabin on Lake Michigan about 20 miles south of Ludington and to get there from our house we would drive north along US-131. From the vantage of the very back of an early eighties Volvo station wagon, the city itself loomed just beyond the lush green wetlands accentuated by the brilliant white of swans slowly paddling through.

The way small children lose sense of time when they are preoccupied, geography becomes distorted when parents are driving. Until I became sixteen the city’s streets remained foreign every time. A muffler shop would change its placard to announce a new week’s specials and I, as a young boy, would no longer recognize the entire street. Compounding this disorientation would be the seating arrangement of these old station wagons; under a trick door in the cargo compartment was a trumble seat, which folded out so that the passenger would be facing out the back window. The result is the rear window providing a flat, ever changing, framed picture not three feet away. All the signs faced away from you and there was no hood to even give you a subtle context apart from the world you were seeing but not participating in. On the days when my family took me into Muskegon to do some shopping the streets seemed disjointed and the context of familiar landmarks never seemed to correspond to the way I remember them.

My photos today are most influenced by those days looking out through a frame.