Feenster

This morning, I pulled down the Jason Fulford book *Crushed* and it reminded me of all my old photos. All those photos I took in 2005 for my old (defunct) photoblog Feenster, when I had been trying my best to find my inner Fulford. Fulford is amazing.

I had been locked out of my Flickr account for a couple years. It’s not worth talking about, except to say that when Flickr required a new Yahoo account for login, it caused problems which grew exponentially. But, today — today I finally broke in. Broke in and downloaded all the stuff and went through those old photos again as if for the first time.

I uploaded the best 80 of the few hundred photos which once lived at feenster.com to brianfeeney.us. They're here for you now, if you scroll back through the Photos section far enough. Feenster started in early 2005, a sister blog to Matt Brown’s much better unsharpen.net. Taking photos for it was my first experience of art as work as melancholic, zen practice. I'd walk around Bloomington with my camera, snapping photos with my eyes open but my mind turned off. Then, later at home, I'd find the shots with any magic in them, open up Photoshop, and toy with color collecting late into the night.

I can't say if these photos actually contain any all those old feelings in such a way that anyone else might find them. But *I* can see myself in them. I'm in those photos, even while I'm on the other side of the lens. I know I'm being sentimental. They're my photos and I put a lot of myself into them that year — 2005. It was a good year.