I lost the negative sometime in the early 2000s. I might find it again, perhaps in an old book, or an envelope in a forgotten drawer. Though by now my hope has dwindled. It exists only as a single print. A little 5x7 that sits in an overly large frame at my parent’s house. I should rescue it, reframe it… but I won’t.

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It’s a straightforward black and white photograph. In one corner there was a young man with a small cart loading a vending machine. Opposite this, across the vast empty space of a mechanized, but quiet airport was Vlad. Looking into the future, as always. This poster of Lenin, face of the revolution, stares directly at this young man in his coveralls loading beverages into a kiosk. The joke is plain and a bit threadbare, but once encapsulated in all the angles and gradients of the airport atrium it feels grandiose.

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For me, it drives at the crux of the photographic process. The pipeline from vision to image. Where all my calculations, guesswork, and accidental discoveries align in a way that borders the intangible.