We are a family of explorers at heart. The foundation of the marriage that has given us such wonderful children is the road. Sometimes Cait and I would spend long hours charting courses through the sprawling maze of Georgia dirt roads. Other times, it was the limitless drone of the Interstate at dusk.
It is a pastime we now share with our children. Sometimes it means a simple detour on the way to school each morning. Other times, it’s an aimless ride on the light rail, watching the familiar world framed in a train window.
Our three-year-old, Felix, is a singer. He loves to sing. He communicates with the world through song. Long after we put him to bed at night, we can hear his ambling lyrics echoing through the ductwork, recounting the day or inventing stories. When he reaches the limits of his vocabulary and emotions, songs are the grounding force that help him (and me) recenter and find peace.
When he started school earlier this year, he understandably had big feelings. Change is not easy for me in mid-life. It’s certainly not easy for him at the start of his own. A therapist once taught me a grounding trick to combat anxious thoughts: take mental note of five things you hear, see, feel, or smell. Then four different things. Keep working your way down to one. If it can work for me, maybe it could work for him.
So when the uncertainty of going to school set upon us, we’d get in the car and point out what we saw on the way: the names of streets; the Moorish tower at Druid Hill overlooking the city; an arrangement of pumpkins on the front steps of a row house; the Johns Hopkins students rushing across Charles Street to go to school—just like him! And it worked.
I don’t remember when this grounding exercise got set to song, but it did. We called it the “street song.” It’s set to the tune of “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain.” The words change every single day. Soon, it became the reason to get in the car. School was an afterthought. We drove to sing, and by happenstance ended up at school. We sought to outdo ourselves, finding new details to add to the song: snow on the street signs, a crane truck that wasn’t there the day before, a familiar dog now wearing boots as the cold of winter set in.
I was recently combing through my archives looking for a specific photo and couldn’t help but notice how many of those details I had inadvertently photographed—some pre-dating our street song. I didn’t think anything of it until later that night, when I was feeding our newborn.
“That would make an interesting collection of photos,” I thought.
Every so often, I print a photo book for our family bookshelf. We have books documenting the photos Cait and I have taken over the past few years: family photos, things seen from car windows, adventures we’ve been on, and significant happenings in our domestic world. So when I started to put this fever dream of a book together, it began as another addition to our family album.
Along the way, I showed it to a friend while discussing self-publishing work. He said I was onto something and should consider making it available to people who want a tangible copy of my photographs.
I’m happy to share that this vision has now taken shape. For those interested, copies of Street Song are available through my online store. This collection represents a glimpse into Baltimore’s street life as we see it, and the locations we have sung along the way: serene early mornings, neighborhood interactions, fleeting moments of unexpected beauty, and the interplay of decay and renewal that defines our urban life. Captured between 2020 and 2024, these images tell an abstract personal story, showing how daily routines and mindful observation can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
For paid subscribers of Ten Minute Exposure and for anyone who deletes their Meta accounts (send proof to michael.wriston@gmail.com), I will provide you with a link for $5 off as a thank-you.
And if you don’t buy a copy—no big deal! I hope this letter inspires you to look at your own work and see common threads you can put together in printed form. The process certainly informed and transformed how I look at my own photographs and how I go about making them. It was both meditative and reflective.
You’ll never regret having a physical copy of the things you make.
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The intro music is "Mana Two - Part 1" by Kevin MacLeod
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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michaelwriston.com / Flickr / Glass / Bluesky
what a beautiful project!! I love it - and the incentive to remove Meta.
that singing exercise is awesome!