There are certain places you spend your childhood looking at without ever really knowing them. Ewen Maddock Dam was one of those places for me. As a kid, I'd cross the bridge and stare out across the water imagining some sort of 90s summer camp taking place out there — canoes, kids running wild, questionable adult supervision and all the other things American movies had convinced me childhood was supposed to involve. A few decades later, I finally came back. This time with a blue kayak, a Mamiya C330 loaded with Kodak Gold 200, a Minolta Weathermatic, a cup of coffee and the increasingly questionable belief that paddling around with an old medium-format camera was a good idea. The objective was simple: make one photograph worth keeping. But somewhere between exposed tree roots, glassy water, sore arms and trying to focus a backwards waist-level viewfinder from a drifting kayak, the morning became about something else. Nostalgia is a funny thing. You don't necessarily want your childhood back. You just occasionally want to stand close enough to it that you can hear the echo. And maybe, if you're lucky, make a photograph of it. This is Field Journal.
