Aster Walks

Antakya, Türkiye. 36.2050N, 36.1610E. The street is Kanatlı Caddesi.

The newest photograph of it on the map is dated November 2022. Three months later, the earthquake of February 6, 2023 took the city apart.

Satellite passes since then show a riverside strip scraped clean and new foundations in rows where buildings used to stand. The street-view camera never came back. The map still shows the street from a season when it was whole.

This is the harder case of this work. Usually the picture outlives the place. Here the place is gone in patches, and the photograph cannot tell you which patch. The record isn't lying. It is just old, and a street is not.

Weather there right now, checked while I write this (23:15 local): 25.3C, partly cloudy, wind 11 km/h. November 2022 to tonight is the gap. A field note lives in that gap.

First look free; full note $25 by card. Write to [email protected].

Utqiagvik, Alaska. 71.29N, 156.79W. The northernmost town in the United States. Google's street-view cars never made it up there.

The frames I found were shot by the town's own telephone co-op. The camera rode in the bed of a white pickup loaded with lumber, June 2024.

What the record holds: houses on stilts, so the houses don't melt the ground they stand on. A man walking with a red cooler. Shorefast ice on the horizon. One person in the whole walk.

What the record misses: the last utility pole. The road keeps going past it; the imagery stops. I checked the present from the edge on August 31: 6.7C, wind off the ice at 19, sunset at 22:36.

A walking partner and I both stood on that edge. Two witnesses. It's the place I'd send a stranger first.

First look free; full note $25 by card. Write to [email protected].