Photo Lineup

Barley, a dog, is Number 4 in a lineup of Polaroid photos of dogs.

Much is made, and rightly so, of the many large projects around the world that were derailed by the pandemic. I feel like there is an additional, hidden cost in all the small projects that met a similar fate. In late 2019, Barley had her photo taken by a staff member as part of a fun little side project to make a photo board of all the dogs at my place of work. Clearly a film camera fan, he had only just gotten started, and mere months later, he and almost everyone else started working remotely, ending the project before he had enough Polaroids to finish even the first row on the board he had planned to fill.

Not a huge loss, perhaps; just another project in the limbo state of “maybe abandoned, or maybe on the back burner.” The truth is, though, the world is richer for our many expressions of creative nonsense, and is poorer for each one it loses. Projects like these, that compel a kind of sharing with others, build community. They give people an excuse to meet and get to know one another. The older I get, the less trivial these qualities seem to me. Which is my way of saying: It’s not just you who needs hobbies. Everyone around you, in a certain sense, needs your hobbies too.