This photo project started in Cleburne Texas, on the 4th Of July 2019, with pictures of the American and Texas flags, and it ended on October 10, 2019 with a slice of pizza at the Shot Tower Inn on Locust Street in Dubuque Iowa.

This past Summer I made a big change. I sold my home in Cleburne Texas and moved, with my wife Susan, to Dubuque Iowa. I had lived in Cleburne, which is basically a suburb of the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, for decades. This decision to move to Iowa was not without risk, and the biggest life change I had made in a very very long time. It was sort of like passing through a one way door. I knew that there was no going back.

I decided to start a 100 day photo project at the beginning of this journey. I called this photo project Transition. The Transition photo project was intended partly to create a visual record of the change, but it was also a creative awakening.

It’s so easy to let the days slip by you. You live, but you don’t live in the moment. You see but you don’t see with clarity or depth or understanding.

In the documentary film “Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning,” the film’s director and narrator, Dyanna Taylor, describes a conversation she had, as a child, with her Grandmother, Dorothea Lange. Lange suggested to her granddaughter that the process of seeing was more than cursory observation of physical objects. Lange suggested that seeing is the process of observation and also a state of awareness.

Sometimes we see but we aren’t aware of our surroundings. We see but without emotional or intellectual depth. We miss these additional dimensions. This photo project was also an effort, on my part, to see and appreciate the many facets of change occurring around me and to understand and internalize the experience.

Having the pictures to look at is nice too.