Serendipity / Everyday

Driving away from my wife and kids and flying to Tucson, AZ on a Saturday morning was so unexpected it felt like someone was formatting the hard drive of my brain and letting me see everything new. Clarity began to set in. The typical chaos of the weekend was not filling my head and my brain just didn't know what to do with this space, this air, this solitude. I wasn't even headed out of town to take a photograph. All I had to do was think.

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Friday morning there had been a post on my blog in the letters section that said " Of course you've seen Everyday by Byron Wolfe..." in reference to my project on my son. At the time, I really didn't know what the person was referring to, nor did I have a chance to look it up.

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Saturday night at a gallery in Tucson I had a conversation with a woman I knew a number of years ago. She asked what I was working on and I spelled it all out to her. "Have you seen Everyday ? You might want to check it out, it sounds like a parallel to what you are up to. She brought the book over, I took a glance at it and bought it from her.

That night I met a bunch of friends I hadn't seen in years, drank wine, ate Mexican food, and smelled the cactus in the 100 degree evening time air. My hotel room was above a nightclub and I waited for the club to close before falling asleep. I woke up at 6:00 am, walked to a park and did something I really never have the luxury of doing: I opened my copy of "Everyday", read the introduction, and really gave the book its due, taking in every page from beginning to ending. It took roughly 90 minutes, a luxurious amount of time these days to get lost in a book. The education you can get by looking at a project that parallels your own, but on a different channel, is really inspiring.

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Byron Wolfe, photographer, photography teacher and father of two, made a photograph a day from 6/23/02-6/23/03. His images look at the clutter, the spilt milk, and a bit of the domestic messiness that fill his days, balancing it all out with bleak images from his day job and nurturing and escapist appreciations of nature, his garden, his fruit trees, and the simple warmth of the sun cutting into his living room. His story is honest yet distanced. It doesn't really pack a punch as much as it seeps into the cracks...you aren't hit by the images as much as you absorb them via osmosis.

See his project HERE. Get his book HERE.