This little set of photos started Thanksgiving morning. I’d had the actual holiday meal the weekend before, and I wanted to see if I could find anything interesting in the opposite of the cozy family gathering: the wide parking lots where people weren’t.

I decided to expand my goal a bit when I thought about the photographer’s task of capturing nothing, emptiness, something missing. It’s a tough thing to do in an interesting way (and I can’t say for sure if I succeeded), focusing on what’s not there.

I’m no authority on the philosophy of nothing, but I can say the lack of something can be a powerful and compelling story-telling tool. Like I wrote weeks ago, many of the best photographs leave some question raised and unanswered, some desired knowledge that we either have to read more about, or to look at another image for, to think about for a while, or simply to accept that we can’t have.

Questions like, where is what was once here? Where did these stairs go? Or, more concretely, how is that person who lost several clothes and one shoe doing?

It turns out, of course, that there are a lot of spaces around us where something was and is no longer. Something is missing, even lost. I hope we always wonder what.

Anyway, I hope the pictures are worth reading my silly thoughts.

As always, thanks for looking.

Dan