What makes a home?

I woke up this morning at 7:30 to a text message from my grandfather that simply read, “Biscuits and gravy at 8:45” So, with an offer like that on the table I responded with, “Count me in” and proceeded to get ready to head over to their house to participate in some delicious breakfast. I decided to grab the 5D on the way out the door to show them and to take some photos around the exterior of the house before breakfast. I did not photograph the exterior of the house at all, really. But I did take some time after eating breakfast to walk around the inside of the house with the camera.

This house has always been an important place to me. Growing up I would often spend summers here with my grandparents and in many ways it was a place that always felt more like home than my own home back in Washington. It took me a long time to realize that what I loved and what felt so special about this place was the unconditional love of my grandparents but that’s a whole other story. We can do the psychoanalysis in another post. But whatever the mechanism, this place has always felt deeply special to me. It’s changed a lot over the years but it felt nice to go around and photograph places within the house that have some deep emotional resonance. It’s maybe one of those Ship of Theseus problems, in a way. The house has changed, parts of it are no longer what they used to be, but at some level it’s still the same, still somehow tied to deep core memories, and it was nice to try and get a piece of that in photographs.