about

In the beginning there was the word, and the word was written on a napkin in a diner that no longer exists, in a town that was briefly famous for a minor flood. I used to work nights cataloguing other people's leftover film, which is how I learned that most photographs are taken facing west, for reasons nobody ever explained to me. There is a local custom -- or I have decided there is -- where you keep one image from every year you were unhappy, and this collection began that way.

I sort the images the way my grandmother sorted river stones, by some criterion I can never fully explain to another person, though I once spent three weeks trying to teach it to a seasonal kelp auditor in exchange for lessons in competitive breath-holding. The machine does a first pass, flagging colors and shapes and whatever it thinks is mood, and I correct it the way you correct a child who has learned the word "melancholy" but keeps applying it to soup. Some photographs sit in a holding folder for months before I know where they belong, which my former landlord, a retired eel farmer with very strong opinions about sequence, would have found unforgivable.

1. Do not upload photographs of rooms you no longer have access to. 2. If a person appears in your image without their knowledge, you are responsible for what happens next. 3. Metadata is permanent. We do not offer metadata removal. Plan accordingly. 4. Images submitted during account review may be used for calibration purposes not described here. 5. You may not photograph the same building from the same angle more than once. We will know. 6. Do not contact other users about their photographs unless they have contacted you first. There is no way to verify who contacted whom first. 7. Photographs of children must not include shadows belonging to adults outside the frame. 8. If your account is suspended, your images remain hosted but are no longer attributed to you. 9. We reserve the right to crop without notification. Original compositions are not archived. 10. Photographs containing text in languages you do not speak will be reviewed by a separate team. 11. Location data is stripped on upload. A different location is then assigned. 12. You may delete your account at any time. Your images will be transferred, not deleted. 13. Do not photograph mirrors that reflect cameras. This is not an aesthetic guideline. 14. By uploading, you confirm that no one in the image has asked you not to.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Honestly I had to look up what a colophon even was, and I still do not entirely understand it, but apparently this is where I say something about the tools I used or whatever. I built this on a Tuesday, probably, in the same chair I have owned since I worked a brief and confusing job laminating certificates for a regional bowling association. There is a ritual in my part of the world where you name your personal projects after fish, and I followed it without asking why.

Leave a like somewhere on the site and I will locate you eventually, the way a particular smell finds you in a grocery store and you spend the next few minutes trying to place it. I used to sort mail for a municipality that no longer exists. If you need to reach me more directly, I am not sure what to tell you.