About ten years ago I carried a camera with me wherever I went. It was mostly film rangefinders back then—Leicas, Bronicas, Olympus XAs, a Zeiss or two—and I had the film developed. And I scanned it myself. I posted the photos to Flickr. I had thousands of photos there. I switched to DSLRS after a while, then back and forth, then went digital for good when film developing started to get ever more expensive.

About five years ago I deleted that Flickr account and posted on Instagram. Then about six months ago I deleted the Instagram account. And so lately the thousands of photos have existed only on my backup drives, nowhere that anyone could access them.

Kept to myself, I have wondered what the point of all those years of photo taking was. I couldn’t help myself, the world was so beautiful that I had to take photos. I think, if not stifled, every person feels this way about life on earth at some point.

In 2013 I left Nebraska and headed for places I’d never been. I took a few photos during the next four years, but mostly I observed and thought. The mystery of life, and what it was all about, what mattered to me, and to others—where I was going, and what I should do—all these things I worked out over and over again in different ways.

This work, the writing and photos, has since coalesced into a coherent vision of a life that I lived—something like a dream, a thread, or a stream—that keeps unspooling and going around in different ways. After battling with the idea of publishing, agents, and all that garbage, I decided to put the entire project on the internet for free, at the rate of 1 to 3 posts per week, for everyone to see.

You can follow along here: A Body of Water

Thanks for reading,

— Hudson