I have many, many alley images sitting patiently for their turn. I came across this Seattle, WA picture (below) on my laptop yesterday. Most of the images are not even scanned yet (from the original negatives) - I have a backlog of maybe 25-30 shots.

I did this shot in July of last year in Seattle and I’ll be back there this year to shoot again. The only other time I was in Seattle was 20 years ago, hitchhiking through with my great friend Gerry Wagschal on a wild cross-continent journey. We started the trip in Montreal, and ended up in San Diego a month later, having gone through one freak experience after another. If you ever want to concentrate experience into a small capsule, go hitchhiking. I started in earnest when I was fifteen. 

My then-girlfriend Vivianne and I were bored one Summer day in 1980, so we decide to hitchhike to where my brother Charlie is working - at a rural gas station 100 miles away. I tell my parents I’m going to her grandparent’s for a few days and off we go. In my old tattered jeans and long hair, we arrive maybe 10 hours later, only to learn that Charlie has a day off. We can’t find him, its getting dark and there’s nowhere to stay - so much for zero planning. We start hitchhiking in the dark, towards Ottawa, maybe 40 miles away, on a lonely country road hoping we can find an open laundromat where we’ll sleep the night (what??). A long, black limo stops and we jump in the big luxurious back with the passenger. He’s a man in his fifty’s, who proceeds to tells us how to make money. “You look like you could use some extra cash,” he says to the two teen runaways. ”Making money is easy! All you do is find someone who wants to have a good time and you get a bottle of wine. Its easy.” Vivianne and I are laughing and we say, “No thanks.” He persists, eventually laughing it off with us. He takes us right to a laundromat in Ottawa and we thank him.

I remember crawling into one of the big dryers and asking Vivianne what would happen if she put a quarter in. An hour later, a couple of greasy older teens come in, asking us if we’ve seen any homeless in the laundromat. We hadn’t. They tell us we can sleep at a friend’s if we want. We say, “cool!”

Their friend is another screw up: a young, drug addict girl, and maybe hooker, with two small kids… The music is blasting and they won’t turn it down for us to sleep, yet we decide this is a good place to crash for the night. 

The story goes on an on until we finally made it back home a few days later.

Here’s Seattle, under a sodium vapor, moonlit sky:

Detail - a couch I lit during the long exposure: