I didn't know how little I knew about my neighborhood. I did not realize how elaborate it was and, in some ways, intense. It's just a podunk place in the cultural backwaters of flyover country, after all.

I knew that Langston Hughes had spent some crucial years of his childhood living a few blocks from my home. And William Burroughs had lived the last 17 years of his notoriously peripatetic life in a house a mile away. Hughes left, and Burroughs stayed, because they both considered the town rather sleepy, and bucolic.

Lawrence, Kansas is in fact, a rather quiet town most of the time, and not urbane. It does have much in common with many midwestern towns of its size. I would never have thought that I could spend a year photographing it, intensively, and experience it as a unique landscape of peculiar dreamlike adventure. But, beneath the surface of uninteresting cultural assumptions, I found an unpredictable pulse of surprises, beauty, unsparing global forces, humor, poignancy, and evidence of danger. Also, as careful viewers will see, three cats.

How was it possible to find something I didn't even know to look for in the first place?

In the late fall of 2011, I didn't know what to do. I had just finished two significant projects, with satisfactory results. I knew I didn't want to repeat myself. I knew I had certain limitations of time and money. I knew I wanted to return to working in black and white with a 4" X 5" camera. Other than that, I had no idea.

I decided to try shooting first and asking questions later. I set out to spend a minimum of ten hours per week, photographing freely, for exactly one year, from the winter solstice of 2011 to the winter solstice of 2012.

On December 21, 2011, I loaded my gear into the car just before sunrise, and headed out for a drive. I drove and drove, looking, on county roads and state highways. Sometimes I stopped to hike, then got back into the car to drive some more. I did this until late afternoon without seeing anything. I eventually got discouraged, gave up and headed home; at least I had tried. Sometimes not finding anything is part of photography, I told myself.

Then about two blocks from my house, I saw two juniper trees that had been carved into comical cartoon cylinders, lurking beside a drunken sidewalk, caught in a skein of power, telephone and cable lines. I had never paid much attention to them. That day they made me chuckle. I parked my car at home, walked back two blocks, and carefully photographed them. On the way back to my house, two other peculiar little things drew me in. By sunset I had three negatives exposed of subjects I wanted to scrutinize.

With that, I decided to spend the next year photographing within walking distance of my home.