On a Summer Evening

Brass band music isn’t normally my thing.

If left to my own devices, I’m usually alternating between girly pop and death metal while the children in the backseat get whiplash from the change up. They’re probably complaining, but I can’t hear them over “Pink Pony Club” or “Climactic Degradation” so it’s fine.

I’ve been trying to put myself in situations that give me different things to photograph than the traps I usually fall into. After enough time with a camera, I start to notice how easy it is to loop back on myself with the same roads, same subjects, same instincts. I stop looking as hard because I think I already know what’s there. I’ve harped about it endlessly, but damn if it isn’t true.

The moments I end up keeping are rarely the ones I planned for. They come from being somewhere I absolutely didn’t expect to be, paying attention in a way I wouldn’t have if I’d stayed home to doom scroll Instagram or Substack. Forcing myself to photograph uncomfortably has made me more confident in my skillset, even it its after the act of shooting has occurred, and I’m trying to keep up the habit.

When I heard there was a brass band playing downtown in Lapeer as part of the America 250 celebration, I decided to bring a camera and just see what happened, because fuck it, right? SOMETHING was going on and that’s a rare occurrence in these parts.

The music was good, excellent even, but what held my attention was everything around it. Families setting up folding chairs along Nepessing Street. Kids running through the crowd, older couples sitting in the shade and shifting in their chairs, probably angry that the children could still have fun in public. People stopping when they ran into someone they knew and getting pulled into conversations that didn’t seem like they were in a hurry to end. It was a simple scene, but it felt like a place being used properly, if that makes sense. As my good friend Josh Hopkins (@chugwaterite on Instagram) says, a third space for people to gather is important. For Lapeer, that’s the courthouse lawn.

I spend a lot of time thinking I need to go somewhere else to find interesting work.

Somewhere quieter, more rural, or a big city. Somewhere with better light or better subjects or better whatever the hell I think I’m missing that week. There’s always a version of somewhere else in my head and I live it vividly. Most of the time, I’m already standing in it, I’m just a dumbass and I fear missing out on almost everything.

My instinct is always to look outward and assume the good images are somewhere farther north or west or out of state entirely. Get in the car and head towards the desert or the ocean. Every direction except where I currently am. Every now and then, I end up in a place like downtown Lapeer on a normal summer evening, and I’m reminded that most of what I’m trying to photograph isn’t rare, it’s just easy to overlook when I’m not paying attention.

The photographs I captured that evening were fine, certainly nothing life changing or career making. I’m not winning any awards here. A few frames I’ll probably keep, a few I’ll forget about in like twenty minutes.

I don’t always need to go looking for something bigger, sometimes I just need to notice what’s already happening right in front of me, no matter how small it is. I just have to keep reminding myself of it.