When I was a student, I took a course in photography as an elective. I enjoy making photographs as a hobby and have collected a lot of images on my computer since making the switch from film photography to digital photography years ago. One of the things that I remember about that photography class, in addition to some of the techniques and skills I gained, are the assignments that we received. Each week we would be assigned a prompt or a theme and we would spend the week making images. In that particular class, we worked with black and white film and made our own prints in the darkroom. Once a week we would set up a small gallery in our classroom with each student contributing one or two photographs in response to the assignment. The standard for the class was an 11” x 14” print, mounted and hung frameless in our gallery area. Assignments like “Dawn” and “candlelight” gave us an opportunity to learn more about light. Assignments like “family” and “community” helped us gain sill at portraiture and casual photography. One assignment that stands out in my mind was “home place.”

At that time, we were living in a one bedroom efficiency apartment in Chicago, not far from the University of Chicago main quadrangle. Our apartment consisted of a bedroom, a bathroom, and an “everything else” room with a small kitchenette at one end, a table, a sofa, and a desk. I had struggled to feel at home in Chicago. The lack of personal space was a challenge. All of the locked doors felt unnatural to me. Hearing sirens going up and down the street outside of our building at all hours of the day and night disrupted my sleep. In my mind Chicago wasn’t really home. I was a Montanan. I was from the west. I was in Chicago temporarily to get an education.

That sense of not being home was reflected in the simple fact that we kept moving during our Chicago years. In four years we lived in five different apartments in addition to the caretaker’s cabin in which we spent two summers out of the city.

I sat at the table in our apartment and struggled with what I could photograph that might capture the sense of home for me. I couldn’t go to Montana to make pictures of rivers and mountains and other features that made it feel like home to me. I didn’t have any of the family heirlooms that make up the furniture in our home these days. I wasn’t attached to much in our apartment. I arranged a stack of books in what seemed to me to be an artful arrangement and photographed them, but it didn’t seem right. I noticed that some of them were from the library and not even mine. They were temporary. Home, I thought, should be something a bit more permanent. I tried to photograph my bible, but there was nothing about the picture that captured my imagination. I think that I ended up with an image of our table, set for dinner for the assignment.

Now, decades later, I haven’t kept the images I submitted for that class. I know, however, that the photograph would still capture a bit of the sense of home for me. For one thing, we have used the same set of everyday dishes for all of our married life. The simple white plates that would have been on that table are the same as the ones we have used for family dinners and meals ever since. Over the years we have collected a few more dishes, but the pattern is the same and they definitely invoke a sense of home for me. But what makes those dishes meaningful to me are meanings that come from layered memories. In those days, we had been married just a few years and hadn’t had time to collect all of those memories.

One of our teachers, who was in his seventies at the time, submitted a photograph of a pair of well-worn shoes. The photograph was well-printed. The focus was sharp and crisp. The lighting had interesting shadows. The shoes looked inviting. That professor was currently living in a house that belonged to the school and within a couple of years made the move from Chicago to California. He had lived in several different buildings over the course of a long and active life. What he was trying to capture was the sense of being at home in his own shoes. The photograph worked well at communicating a sense of home.

I have struggled with a sense of home for all of my adult life. I left Montana as a young man believing that my departure was temporary. My plan was to go to Chicago, finish my education, and come back to Montana to settle. Life didn’t work out that way. After Chicago, we lived in North Dakota, Idaho, and South Dakota, but never Montana. And now we have moved to Washington. Over the last couple of weeks we were in Montana. It was the first trip to that state for me since we sold the last piece of family property there last April. We drove right by the town where I grew up without stopping. I enjoyed sleeping by rushing rivers and walking in the mountains. I took photographs of places that were familiar to me. But when we took the exit off of the Interstate and turned onto the back road that leads to our son’s farm, when we pulled into the yard of the farm, and when we left the farm for our house down the road and pulled into our driveway, it felt like I was coming home. Sitting at the old library table where I have written so many pages of my journal feels like home. Listening to the tick tock of the antique clock feels like home.

I’m not sure what I would photograph if I received the assignment today. I might photograph that clock. I might photograph my grandchildren. I might photograph the wedding ring on my wife’s hand. I might photograph the white dishes on the round oak table where we dine. I have less of a sense that home is any single address and more of a sense that home is where the people who are most important in our lives gather. Then I realize that those people live in many different places and call many different places home.

Perhaps I am beginning to feel at home in my own shoes. And I hope that I continue to feel comfortable walking in those shoes and discovering new places to be.