Inside the original 14th century oven at Schloss Heidelberg

I have always been drawn to Europe. Now, for me, it’s not the idea of lounging on Mediterranean beaches or shopping in Paris that draws me there (awesome as those things may be). Rather, it’s things like heritage, legacy, and history that seem so prevalent anywhere and everywhere in Europe and yet so scarce here in the states that attracts me. I see a land full of reminders of the people who came before us… their legacies, their traditions, their stories, their lessons. The lives they left behind. When I was young my father presented me with a book of my families genealogy. I was fascinated. Reading through the names, stepping further and further back in time, examining the legacy of my own family (some of it good, some not so much) ignited my imagination. It left me wanting more. Living in the states it seems so many of our own “legacies” end up getting lost in all the noise of modern American life. The ripples we leave behind simply get washed away by the crashing waves of an “all new, all the time” world. I think sometimes you need those ripples.

That’s actually one of the things that originally drew me to photography; time travel. The power to freeze an instant in time, to be experienced again, to be made tangible. Or perhaps to travel vast distances and thousands of years and recreate a single moment long since lost, or one that had never existing at all. Often this was the inspiration for my illustrations in college. Now my camera is my Tardis, and where better to travel time than Europe?

So, over the next couple weeks I wanted to share some of the images we captured, and the fascinating stories my wife, my one year old son, and I encountered while visiting a small village in southwest Germany, as told through the art and architecture they left behind.