And Isaac digged again the wells of water which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father, and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them. — Genesis 26:18

There is a particular kind of work that looks like looking backwards but is not. It is standing at the edge of what is known and reading the soil for signs of water. It is digging again the wells that were stopped up, and calling things by their right names.

Field Notes from the River is a serialised family history and the lines that connect them to the present. It is built from records, photographs, and the gaps between them. Some of what is here is documented. Some of it is reconstructed from what the documents refuse to say. All of it is true.

Not all of it looks backwards. I write as a sojourner — someone who passes through places rather than belongs to them, and whose work is to witness. Field Notes from the Road is its present tense: where I photograph, and why I keep going. It is the same digging. Only the tense changes.