negotiation

What happens to the photographs you take when surroundings aren’t “exotic” anymore? Do you stop taking them?

Or do you force the “normal” into the realm of “exotic”?

I’ve been in Houston now for 5 days, after living on a motorbike in Central and South America for ten months. There I used my camera as both a weapon and an intimacy device, as a means through which to grasp at what I needed to emotionally sustain myself, and as a way to negotiate my presence in a string of cultures and places where I did not belong. I accepted and understood my status as an outsider and grew adept at learning how to handle it.

My relationship with Houston is ambiguous. Having grown up here, I thought I knew what to expect. But this city, sprawling, built for cars out of gridded surface streets and tangled freeways, characterized (so I’ve always thought) by strip malls and parking lots, has hidden surprises that defy my own smugness. They appear every time I turn a corner on one of my walks. They turn up in the detritus I find in rain puddles or in the spices whose smells I don’t recognize from backyard grills or exhaust vents of restaurants down the street. I could roam this neighborhood blindfolded, I spent so much time here as a kid. But a lot changes in 30 years.

Rhythms, paces, patterns, methods – the signifiers conjuring “Houston” in the imaginations of some 7 million people now living in its greater metro area - are in fact constantly changing. This place is therefore unknown to me. “Unknown” is forever attached to the “exotic” – the other. So why not inhabit its skin in the manner I have any other place that’s felt strange? Explore as an adventurer would, as something shiny, new and bright to hold up to a magnifying glass? Every damned blade of grass will have its own personality. And my camera will have a purpose again.