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.
