This is an old farm-house along Grandview Road.  I have meant to stop and take some pictures for a while now so I stopped the other day.  The house sits back from the road a ways so I got out of my car and was going to see if I could walk closer, but when I got about 20 feet from my car it started to rain so I quickly took this single picture at a 230mm focal length before returning to my car.  I’ll probably go back another time and get some more pictures, but maybe not.

I enjoy taking and viewing pictures of remnants of the past.  When I first came to Hanover, PA I was enthralled with the opportunities to make pictures in the older parts of the town.  I just loved the old architecture, etc.; but lately not as much.  I believe that spending time making and viewing such pictures is just a distraction.  It’s just something we do to avoid thinking about the future.  When we view pictures like the above we have a tendency to romanticize the past rather than to learn from it and then apply what we learned to creating the future.

I would rather use my photography to help understand the future.  I would rather make pictures which help us think about and create a future that is better than the past, but I haven’t figured out how to do that.  It’s not yet possible to photograph what will be, so for the time being I’ll remain a frustrated photographer and occasionally use pictures of the past to engage your attention while I nudge you to think about the future.