Bellingham

You can tell a lot about a city from the myriad slices of life found in their pictures. Those icons and memories perfectly preserved in digital amber for the tapping of keys and clicking of mice to unlock. Bellingham is no exception.

You see his local businesses discretely advertising to a niche audience; the landmarks and parks made popular by word of mouth and essential experiences. You get to see the voices and poetry of the personalities that inhabit him. All those defined characteristics that make a list of the essential visual and lived experience peppered across this city’s landscape, crystallized and collected through the thousand perspectives of everyone passing through.

Bellingham wears the faces of profile pictures some familiar, some unknown, and with bodies of news articles and skies (always the skies). His limbs are landscapes gently jagged in their rolling hills and curved around bays and mountains. Houses and sidewalks sprinkled with the idiosyncrasies and windfall of life bloom across the city’s curves like circus personalities with microbrews.

His seasons and sunsets, evident in exclamations of disbelief and outrage beside sighs of joy paint a picture of the various neighborhoods circling the city’s heart. With subdued excitement there’s life in these streets. Ghosts of a gridline overlayed in concrete, lined with homes, once tall, now a specter of forgotten memories, these streets pulsate with the warmth of a star eight minutes in the past. It’s not just the life on the streets, it’s the life in them, the sovereignty of silence and the cold, hard life of stones.

Snapshots of first meetings and last farewells, the starting of many an epic journey, all captured perfectly in the flow of his parade with an unintentional honesty, bookend the stories of his existence. His alleyways and neon profile capture the heady, lingering scent of old piss, stale beer and cheap green before the ever-present threat of sudden rainfall washes it away again.