a shift in meaning.

When Denny and I were doing our doctoral work at CU in Boulder, we discovered that independently, we’d each spent months at a time in our lives just driving across this country, exploring. This was taken on one of those long runs to the Northwest, where I kind of meandered around Wyoming and Montana for a while. Long, empty roads. For long times. Alone. But that’s not why I’ve posted this. Nor is the white (state-sponsored memorial?) cross, which is why I originally took the image.

This highway sign, nothing more than a pinhead in the photo (okay, I exaggerate a little) is what I now find fascinating. When I look at how much this has been blown up, and consider how I didn’t have primo cameras or lenses back then (I still don’t), and that this is freaking film, I am honestly blown away by the quality of the photography we were able to do. Not perfect (the grains’s extreme and the foreground sucks), but not bad. I was on Highway 89, and when I saw that, it triggered a recollection of being there on that road. I needed that highway sign number to make memory-sense of the image.