Steel City Discovery

No one wants to be that guy who bores his friends with 35mm slides of his vacation photos, so as I write this on my last day of summer break, I'll be that guy who posts them on the internet.

Being from Cincinnati, my opinion of Pittsburgh was pretty low. That 2005 Bengals playoff loss to the Steelers reinforced my Steel City prejudice. However, despite the rivalries between the sports teams, Pittsburgh is remarkably similar to Cincinnati. This became clear to me once I came across the website of Mike Muder. In 2006, I was still in high school and shooting with my first digital camera. I wasn't sure what photography meant to me or what I wanted to do with it. Seeing Mike's work gave me a better sense of what I wanted to photograph, what I wanted to show, what I wanted to say and taught me to appreciate where I came from. The way he presented his work and his city became one of the inspirations to starting QC/D. As I prepared to embark for a baseball trip to Pittsburgh, I had hoped to maybe get the chance to finally meet Mike, but he had disappeared from Facebook, I lost his email and he hadn't updated his website/blog in quite some time.

A Blimp in the Sky.

My head hurt from a long day of drinking and a long week of working as our designated driver drove us out of the comfort of downtown to the the typical suburban bar that we usually gather at after work. A beer there, some excedrin from the gas station next door and we eventually found ourselves near the Indiana border and I-74 at a party filled with high school kids. A "solid bro" named Ray wanted to fight me for making out with his cousin. I wasn't familiar with Ray or his cousin, nor had I made out with anybody.

Surf Cincinnati.

- A July, 1999 photograph of the Surf Cincinnati wave pool with the original park logo superimposed over it to create what, at the time, was a postcard-ish view. Photo credit: Bill Ware

The other day I was touring around a waterpark, sweating my pants and tie off in the sweltering mid-west heat. Why I was dressed like that and what I do for a conventional living is not important, what's important is what the smell of chlorine and sun screen reminded me of. I never really did finish the story of Surf Cincinnati. A story that began on Valentines Day 2006. Surf Cincinnati had been my "breakthrough" into urban exploring, the first place I went with the intention to truly explore, photograph and document a location. It was a place I had been numerous times as a kid when it was still open, a place that reminded you of the Malibu Sands episodes from "Saved By the Bell" and a place that would end as a catalyst and outlet for my photography and creativity.