In 2005, in the months before having our first baby, buying a condo, and starting my own business I travelled for 4 weeks through Belarus and Ukraine. I wanted to do something different from past work, and did. I wasn't sure what I was doing. But after intensely personal experiences in Russia I discovered this felt... different. Impersonal. Small. I avoided focusing on individuals (mostly) and opened my shots way up. Sometimes with a person, sometimes not.

I was actually pretty excited. I got back and had time to develop 1 roll of film before things got out of control. I quit my job (from freezing street in Warsaw while friends waited for me) the night before I flew home; a baby was born; we bought a decrepit 100 year old former boarding space for working men. Photography, no. I paid a lab to develop the rest. They did a bad job. Too much agitation, scratched negs, blotchy negs (too little agitation, when there wasn't too much.) I hated everything. I put it in a binder on a shelf and forgot about it. Around the time that kid we'd been waiting for went off to college, I pulled out the binder of 18 year old negs and tried a revisit. I fucking love it. This is it.

Technical notes. I shot Tri-X pushed to 1600. Because I no longer have a darkroom this had to go digital. I used the best shitty film scanner money can buy and aside from taking some digital liberties with rolls that had either been over or under developed, I kept my treatment of each neg within the bounds of what I could have achieved in the darkroom with multicontrast fiber paper, lots of dodging and burning, various developers at various dilutions, bleach, and retouching pens. I probably would have toned them, at least a little, but for every bit as beautiful as that can be in the real world, it often looks cheesy in digital, or creates issues with banding.