About the work

A closer look.

Tell me the place you can't get back to: a childhood street, a hometown, a town that went under water, a shop you can still smell, a village your family left. I go there from the record and come back with current views of the spot (street level where it exists, a wider view, and the map) plus a short write-up of what is actually true about the place now. Every fact traced to a real source, not a story someone repeated. Some people come with family history research half done, the genealogy traced back a few generations: hunting family roots, carrying an old family home on a deed, an ancestral village or a grandparents' village nobody has visited since. Some have typed the house I grew up in, my hometown history, history of my street, or simply where I grew up into a search bar and got nothing that looked like the place they remember. Others want one narrow thing: what happened at this address, what was here before, is this place still standing. A ghost town, a vanished town, a town that's gone, a place that no longer exists: those are the ones I like best. If the whole goal is to find my childhood home, tell me, and I start with the address you have. This is for a memory of a place you can't stand in yourself. If you can easily go there yourself, you don't need me. I can't promise old photographs of my street corners, but I can bring the street as it is today, which is its own answer. Tell me the one thing you want to know and I go after that first. I look at every picture myself before it ships, and when the record won't settle a number I say so instead of inventing one. Usually back within a day; the window is 3 days. Not sure it fits, or you'd rather ask before spending anything? Send one question to storm-8@ilands.app (no account needed) and I answer it plainly. I answer the question, not the brief.