A Look Back at Summer 2020
For my first blog post, I thought it would be fitting to tell the backstory behind a photo collection I am now referring to as the “Dust & Scrawl” collection. This collection of photographs is from the Summer of 2020 and they were taken predominantly in South and Southwest Philadelphia, particularly the neighborhood of Kingsessing.
To preface this story, we have to go back to May of 2020 when I acquired the Fujifilm x100V, the most recent in the Fuji x100 line and a camera which I had been eager to get my hands on. One very exciting aspect of the x100V is that, while being a digital camera, it offers a number of features that provide an experience meant to simulate photographing with a traditional film camera.
In the early stages of testing the camera, I wanted my photos to have that film quality look to them and as such, I quickly developed a lightroom film simulation preset that I began using as the basis for editing my photographs.
At the time I began this project, I had already photographed Philadelphia extensively, although predominantly in and around center city and focused more on cityscapes and the urban environment. I worked at a vape shop in South Philadelphia at the time, so I was frequently in the area and I used that as the branching out point for my explorations into some of the smaller outlying neighborhoods of the city.
One such neighborhood that ended up providing me the wealth of my content for the summer was a neighborhood known as Kingsessing, which is in Southwest Philadelphia, just across the Gray’s Ferry Bridge. By the end of the summer I knew Kingsessing like the back of my hand. This collection also includes a small number of photos from South Philadelphia and Central New Jersey.
My focus for this project was to document everyday scenes and locations within the smaller outlying neighborhoods of the city; to capture part of the character of the city that might otherwise be missed by those who don’t take the time to truly explore. Urban decay is featured prominently in this collection, an unfortunate by-product of Philadelphia’s history of de-industrialization.
In the process of putting together this photo project, I began developing a sub-collection of photographs of various abandoned trucks I began to encounter in my explorations. It began with an abandoned school bus, then an old ice cream truck, and eventually it seemed like everywhere I turned I would find another gem of an abandoned vehicle, always heavily tagged and each more unexpected than the last. It became a scavenger hunt of sorts for me.
I took my final batch of photographs for the collection in late August and decided to wrap up the series having put together a decent sized body of work and as my focus was beginning to shift to abandonments. I had the idea of having these photos printed up as a small coffee table photo book that could be available for purchase, and I still have intentions of making that happen. I am also considering the idea of revisiting the project this upcoming summer and doing a continuation, Dust & Scrawl Pt. 2, Summer 2021. Who knows?
View the full Dust & Scrawl collection below: