Photos From a Return to 'Home'

It’s hard for me to say I have a home place. I don’t remember anything from where I was born except maybe an echoey church with bright lights and water, but that’s probably a false memory based on a slide that my parents showed me. I also don’t remember anything from the first state that I lived in, but I did grown up in Iowa. Returning to Dubuque, where I grew up, feels familiar, yet, different. And that’s a perspective to use when approaching photography of the familiar.

One of the lucky things that I have going for me on visits like this is that I have a young kid that tags along with me. When going to a place I’ve been before, I like to show him the places that I love, but might not photograph well in my normal style. I do something similar on my photo workshops. I take people to places they’ve never been before and show them the area. The difference is I target locations that I know are photogenic and work well for the style I’m known for.

These places are familiar to me, but different to others so I can cash in on those differences by adjusting my approach to account for their interests.

Depending on your goal, the key when returning to an area, in my opinion, is to approach familiar locations with the curiosity of a kid who is on a tour learning your stories. On this trip to downtown Dubuque, I wanted to show my son some of the locations that I had a connection with as a kid. While I don’t know if he appreciated all the locations, trying to point out things I thought were cool and remembered but had photographed, inspired me to pull out the camera.

Like the above stairs at Dubuque’s Carnegie-Stout Public Library. As a kid I always thought this part of the library was cool even though it wasn’t used much back then. Now it’s bustling with quiet people. That’s a huge contrast to the Grand Marais library, which isn’t quiet at all in comparison. I thought maybe that we’d get “shushed.” My kid noticed how quiet everything was there. I don’t know that I would have noticed that on my own.

I never realized how cool this old building that held a radio station (if I’m remembering correctly). I never realized how unusual it looked until I was walking by with my kid and telling him what it used to be.

I had to tell him about the cool door photos from a photography book of Dubuque’s doors that neighbor made when I was younger. It was similar to other door books that came out at about that time but documented Dubuque’s doors. And this one was cool.

And this next one was where my grandfather was a member.

And this one has doors that are now full of bricks.

I bet everyone of us could walk around our ‘home’ town for a day, remember what that part of town was known for, and figure out something to photograph that represented it. All these photo come from about 20 blocks of the downtown, and I had many more stories that I could have related and photographed something that was spurred in my memory.

We even stopped at a church with famous tiffany stained glass from an artist from the early 1900s. My kid asked the front desk person if they would share a bit about the glass so he could learn more about it. We were told that the glass maker destroyed all his secret formulas at the end of his life, so none of the colors and glass can be recreated again. We learned all the ways the glass was made, and how to look at the glass to see what was special and see the secrets of its effects.

It felt enlightening.

I couldn’t help but make that visual pun. This is what’s important: having the curiosity to ask, the curiosity to remember, and using curiosity to photograph the unfamiliar found within the familiar.

My kid got a little bored with me showing him everything and he got tired of me always stopping to photograph something, so we did have to go have a little kid fun afterwards.

While the fair seemed much different from what I remembered, it was familiar enough. But I had never carried a camera there before. I got many pictures.

I hope you soon spend some time exploring the familiar with an eye towards different.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this issue, and don’t forget to sign up for my 2025 workshops. Five still have space including my Minnesota staples: winter, waterfall, fall and a new workshop focusing on Lake Superior seascapes.

I’ll see you again in two weeks.