This blog is based in Northeast Ohio. It’s mostly photos for now.
The photos are meant to look like the late 2000s and early 2010s. If you need a reference point: photos you’d see on a Midwest emo mixtape. I grew up in Ohio, and those years are the ones I’m most nostalgic for.
Most posts will be trips to cities in the area to take photographs. I go looking for the mundane: a local business, an ordinary street, and an abandoned building. The kind of photo a local would look at and say, “Oh yeah, I know where that is,” and an outsider might scroll right past.
Everything is shot on a 15MP Fujifilm point-and-shoot from 2010, except the photo of the camera itself, obviously. The camera holds up better than I expected, but looking closer, it shows its age. It’s a little grainy, it struggles in low light, and the photos look like they came straight out of a photo album from that time.
Eventually, I would like to post music recommendations here. Artists will be whatever reminds me of the Fall & Winter seasons and the Midwest: Midwest Emo, Indie, Dreampop, Shoegaze, etcetera.
The name fits what I photograph. The Rust Belt overlaps a lot with the Midwest, and much of what I end up shooting is what it left behind.
I only learned what the Rust Belt was recently, so in case you haven’t heard of it either: it’s the part of the country, mostly around the Great Lakes, that used to run on steel, cars, and coal. It was once known as the Steel Belt. The “rust” refers to what was left behind after the factories closed: lost jobs, shrinking towns, empty buildings.1
