The world you grew up in no longer exists, but what if you went back anyway? What if I showed you?
The trees you climbed as a kid are either dismembered stumps in your childhood backyard or they’d make your knees hurt.
Your mom is no longer in that garden, the weeds have taken over every inch of where her tomatoes and squash used to grow.
You can look at the house you grew up in, and maybe you have the privilege to walk through it, but you’re taller now; the marks on the floor were buffed out when you left.
It will never be the same. The only thing you have left are photographs. Your mind races to find a way to return to the place you once knew and felt comfort, but you can’t go back. The past you grew up in no longer exists. This is the dark side of nostalgia.
It Will Never Be The Same is a parallax photograph I took in my childhood backyard in the dead of night. The humidity was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. We ran out of bug spray while we were shooting. The flies, moths, and whatever other creepy crawlies found a graveyard in our floodlight used to illuminate the scene.
This piece inspired the entire project. In 2023, I was being nosy on Zillow and looking at listings in my old neighborhood. My dad rents out my childhood home to college students, so I found the listing and started looking through the photos. I felt a knot in my throat when I got to the backyard because it was everything I remember, exactly as I remembered it.
It hit me at that moment that I literally can never go back to that yard, even if I return to that place, because in 2022 a powerful hurricane came through and tore down all of the trees that I climbed as a child (except for one, more on that later). It wouldn’t even look the same. Quite literally, it will never be the same.
