A City of Breakups

Amsterdam, a photo essay

I love to share my old film on LR. These scans were uploaded en masse to Facebook albums alongside fuzzy selfies and screenshots with inside jokes. Picking my favorites, ten years later, allows me to see these photos in a different way. Almost like I see them as art instead of an archive. The images hold more weight as my memory deteriorates, as my emotions settle instead of spike.

If you missed them, here are Seville, Rome, Lisbon, Barcelona, Paris, Cinque Terre, and Vienna.

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All of my breakups took place in Amsterdam. This is a lie, depending which of my friends you decide to ask. (We all write our own histories - but witnesses speak for themselves.)

There is a finitude to the city that is unrivaled in my emotional memory. If New York is a city of beginnings, new relationships and new friendships and new outfits and new routines, Amsterdam is an ending, always. I look at these photos and feel like I’m seeing them for the first time. I remember the blur in my viewfinder from the tears in my eyes. I cried all of the time. I broke down in the Rijksmuseum not once, but twice, one year apart. I ate so many cheese samples that I was constipated for over a week. But these photos tell a different story: my absolute favorite paintings in the world, all in one place, cold beer along the canal with friends, sunburn in Vondelpark, where we lounged for hours without realizing that someone had stolen one of my friend’s shoes. We laughed about this for years. I’m still laughing now.