Joseph Szabo

Today as I had a Gilmore Girls marathon with my mom I noticed that one of the characters had a t-shirt that had this photo on it. I knew I'd seen the photo before but couldn't remember who'd taken it. I searched and searched on google and low and behold, I found it! I found it first on some picture website that didn't tell me who had taken the picture, so I resumed searching and found the website I'd seen it on years ago.
The photographer is Joseph Szabo.
I remember the first time I saw this picture I was in my sophomore year at Utah State. I used to hang out in the library for fun, in between classes, and after classes. I was taking a full course load at the time. I had early morning till mid afternoon classes and after classes , on most days, helped at the middle school with their wrestling team. Whenever I wasn't in class or wrestling, I was studying. I usually studied til very early morning and had a few hours before I had to go to class again, so i wasn't really getting sleep at night. I got in the habit of going to the library between my classes. I loved that library. It was big and shiny and had books and computers and people that looked like they were trying to meet deadlines. As soon as i walked into that library i instantly felt smarter.
I got into the routine of getting out of class, rushing to the library (to make the most of my break and stay out of the cold), buying a muffin, and heading down to the bottom floor.
Between my early morning classes I had a two hour break and I got into the habit of using that two hour break to take naps on the arm chairs. The bottom floor had these super comfy arm chairs and I'd put two of them together to make a bed. The makeshift bed was a little small, but I was always tired, so it served its purpose.
It was cool because people rarely went on the bottom floor. I'd be in there for hours and would maybe see one or two people. And the noise level was perfect for anything I wanted to do. It was quiet enough that I could sleep and study, but loud enough that I didn't feel completely alone.
When I didn't have to study, got sufficient sleep, didn't have wrestling, but still didn't want to go home, I would pick out random books and start reading. The bottom floor was the art floor so I started looking through a whole bunch of photography books, sculpture books and drawing books. I started getting into older photos that were black and white. I started looking online for cool photos by this dude. That was were I first saw this photo. Boy, do I miss that library.