This is a photograph taken while descending into Schenley Park during a February snowstorm in 2010. I moved to Pittsburgh in 2002 and in some way still feel like a newcomer – interested in the history of Pittsburgh but disconnected from it, aware of the difference in my relation to the place from that of people I know who were born here or whose families go back several generations. On this day with pedestrians in the streets and no one driving, we walked and talked with neighbors we didn’t know. I felt relaxed and at home in a new way. The camaraderie of getting through bad weather together was part of it. But in the park the snow obscured familiar features and transformed the woods into its elemental parts – tree, snow, wind, sloping terrain. Through some inverted logic the erasure of specifics of place allowed me to feel that the park, my neighborhood, the city, was mine.
