Blog Archives
Urban Irony (Christmas Afternoon)
We spent some time on Christmas afternoon walking around the site of the Christmas Day 2020 bombing in Nashville. Even after a year, there is still much work to be done to fix (or demolish, I guess) the buildings that were damaged. The murals here are on the short side of the block that was bombed – they’re painted on plywood that covers where windows used to be.
Christmas usually makes me feel sad, and this scene fed right into my emotions. In front of a mural that says “because you matter you are not alone,” a man sat alone on the cold sidewalk.
Nashville, Tennessee
photographed 12.25.2021
his day job
He’s following his dream, but no one else seems to be.
Nashville, Tennessee
photographed 12.23.2021
Always Onward
Parts of downtown Oklahoma City have things like convention centers and sports arenas and big hotels. Other parts have parking lots with chain-link fences around them. And sometimes, the streetcar will stop long enough for passengers to get a quick photo of all the things.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
photographed 11.25.2021
168 empty chairs
Calm and peace and innocence were shattered at 9:02 am on April 19, 1995. It was a Wednesday. Employees, and children who attended the on-site daycare center, inside the Alfred Murrah Federal Building were surely busy doing their Wednesday things, right up until the moment an explosive-filled truck exploded just outside the building.
One hundred sixty eight people were killed; 19 of them were children at the daycare center.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial is on the site of the attack, and the Field of Chairs commemorates those lost that day. The chair here, in the foreground, represents Carol Louise Bowers; she was 55 years old and was on operations supervisor at the Social Security Administration. Accounts state that she would always answer the phone with “a happy voice” and her relative recounted that she was the “kind of person who …spread joy everywhere she went.”
(I would encourage you to go to the Field of Empty Chairs page to learn more about Carol and to see the layout of the chairs in this thoughtful and well-designed memorial.)
Oklahoma City National Memorial
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
photographed 11.25.2021
One Day | One Image 