I have been an avid photographer for decades.

I took up the hobby in my early teens, drifted away for a while when I lost easy access to a darkroom, and took it back up with a passion in the digital age.

In recent years my passion has been architectural abstracts. I can’t explain the attraction, but it’s what catches my eye most consistently.

Given my photographic interests, I used to love walking around cities–mostly Minneapolis, obviously, because I live here–and taking hundreds of photos a day. Despite the fact that I correct the geometry of images to reduce geometric distortions I generally have a strong sense of what the final product will look like.

It’s just how my mind works.

The COVID lockdowns changed everything for me. The clearing out of downtowns might sound like a blessing to somebody like me; I don’t photograph street life, and if a person shows up in one of my photographs it would generally be an unwelcome accident. But what made walking around alone in the midst of a city safe was the fact that there were people everywhere.

I have some pretty high-end equipment–generally, I walk around with a camera and lens worth over $3000–and doing so is idiotic without the cover provided by a large number of people around.

The George Floyd riots added to the danger. Not that I would have gone anywhere during the riots, but rather because post-riots the police can no longer be counted on to protect people against criminals, and the criminals know it.

The result is an empowered criminal class and an expansion of that class as people have seen they have carte blanche to intimidate people.

Lawlessness breeds more lawlessness. You have seen the videos of not just shoplifting, but also of random assaults and robberies in broad daylight. I follow a feed of Minneapolis crime and it is scary how pervasive it is.

I haven’t done a walking tour of downtown in a couple of years because of this. My last architectural walk was in Ann Arbor last year during the school year because I assumed that a smaller college town would be safe. It was, although everybody was wearing a mask outside on a sunny day in 2022. Weird.

I did manage an architectural tour of Chicago last year–but this time by tour boat.

I had originally planned on walking the city but my wife nixed the idea as rather stupid. Even the Miracle Mile is no longer really safe to walk through. It’s not that getting mugged is a certainty, but rather that the risk/reward balance is all wrong.

It is absurd that in the space of a year or two America’s downtowns have become high-risk zones for walking. In 2019 I would never have thought twice about walking the streets of most cities during the daytime because the streets would have been bustling, and even the most liberal mayors and city councils would defend their tax base by ensuring that the downtowns, at least, were desirable places to be.

Everything changed in 2020. COVID lockdowns cleared out downtowns, and the George Floyd riots made politicians more worried about displeasing activists than the businesses that kept the city afloat.

Business property taxes keep cities afloat. There is a reason why cities push downtown development–all those tall buildings translate into big bucks for the city to spend, and all those suburban workers who commute downtown pour more money into the city’s coffers.

The one-two punch of lockdowns and riots has emptied out the streets of cities. People actively avoid city centers now except in a few select cities, and with the drawdown of federal policies that have poured money into cities to prop up their finances a whiff of desperation can be smelled.

I don’t have much sympathy for the politicians who did this to themselves. They pursued policies that inevitably and predictably led to what is being termed the “urban doom loop.” Cities chose policies that drove people out, revenue declined and businesses left, and that in turn drives more people away as services decline. It is a vicious circle that threatens most cities in America and is already killing cities like Portland and San Francisco.

But as a citizen and as a (very selfish) photographer it pains me that I can’t even walk most of the cities of America without feeling unsafe.

Chances that any single visit will result in disaster are minuscule, of course, but the risk multiplies with each visit, and the consequences of something bad happening are potentially dire. I only felt unsafe once in Minneapolis before 2020, when I drifted out of downtown into a sketchier part of town to get a longer view. Now I don’t go at all.

That, to me, is incredibly sad.

Other examples of my photography can be found here.