An extra special Fourth | Scene Through the Lens

Independence Day has always been my favorite holiday.

My dad was born on the Fourth of July, so we celebrated both events on the day every year.

He was also in the military and we lived all over the world (I went to three different high schools, in three different time zones). Growing up overseas, the holiday was extra special for us young expats as it was a way to connect with “the States.” We mostly only knew our country from history class — and from watching dubbed American TV shows.

In President John Adams’ correspondence to his wife Abigail, he predicted that the Declaration would be celebrated by future generations every July with parades and bonfires.

He was right.

I have covered dozens of July Fourth celebrations in Philadelphia , photographing parades, medal ceremonies, hot dog grills, summer Mummer and patriotic music concerts, fireworks, historic reenactments, bell ringings, and festivals.

This year the holiday is extra special for me as it also marks my 40th anniversary at The Inquirer.

I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy coming to work every day since then to make pictures that show the constant variety of life.

The now-shuttered building at the top of this column is where I spent my first night in the city. I was here for a job interview, and I stayed in what was then the Society Hill Hotel — a small rooming house above a bar in the city’s historic district, rather than a downtown corporate hotel.

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It was only after I got the job that I realized I was only two blocks away from where our nation was founded.

Over the years I have made up for that oversight — many times over. Anytime I am between assignments in the vicinity, I always stop by to look up at Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, even if it’s only through the window.

I have always been interested in American history, so being able to walk the same streets as the founders, stand in the same buildings, or look at the same objects they saw has always left me in awe. I can’t help but feel as Abraham Lincoln did, speaking at Independence Hall on Feb. 22, 1861, when he stopped here on the last day of his inaugural journey, where he was sworn in as our 16th president:

“I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here, in this place, where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live …”

And now that the newspaper’s offices have moved, too, I can see the bell’s pavilion and Independence Hall right from our sixth-floor newsroom.

When I started working here I did more than walk historic streets.

The Inquirer had reporters based in bureaus around the country, the world, and in offices in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey suburbs, and Northeast Philadelphia.

Besides daily assignments, I covered major sporting events and international news. My first published photo in the newspaper was the game-winning, overtime touchdown in the United States Football League’s first divisional playoff game. That photo, and more from the 1980s are in the slide show. It’s followed by galleries of each of the next four decades, plus two others.

In one of those first years here, after covering President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration, I returned to the streets of Philadelphia and spent weeks photographing our city’s unhoused men, those living on the steam grates of Center City.

Inquirer reporter Michael E. Ruane wrote in the introduction to the photo essay that ran in our Sunday Magazine, “In their beards and heavy coats, some of the homeless look as if they have stepped out of the past, ragged Confederate ghosts on modern city streets.”

While on a 1997 assignment to photograph Stephen Ambrose, noted historian and author of the Lewis and Clark book “Undaunted Courage,” I watched him pluck a sprig off an Osage orange tree in one of the city’s colonial cemeteries, so he could take it back home to plant in Montana. Ambrose explained that the tree was descended from cuttings that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark sent east to President Thomas Jefferson nearly 200 years earlier.

I was fascinated to learn of Philadelphia’s connections to Lewis and Clark’s expedition. In addition to those sample cuttings, 200 other plant specimens collected in the field ended up here, as well as their extensive and amazing journals.

But before their trek even began Jefferson sent Lewis, a military frontiersman, to the intellectual, medical, scientific, and trading center of the new country - Philadelphia - for training and supplies for the expedition. I was determined to share with our readers this city’s connection to what is also known as the Corps of Discovery.

After September 11, like most Americans, I looked at my country in a new way. And I decided I wanted to explore more than the local angle. Lewis and Clark became the inspiration for my own journey across America.

On the first Fourth of July weekend following the events of 9/11, I set out from beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis on the first of four road trips driving West on my own cross-country journey of discovery, as I retraced the 3,700 miles traveled by Lewis and Clark.

Later, during , as the nation observed the one-year anniversary of 9/11, I stood atop the Continental Divide on the Montana-Idaho border, where Lewis and Clark, expecting to see the Pacific Ocean were instead confronted with the Rocky Mountains.

And on a cold February night, I listened in the dark, without my cameras, inside a Mandan earth lodge in North Dakota as Hidatsa Indian storyteller Keith Bear played taps on his flute.

I would ultimately log almost 5,000 rental car miles and produce as many images in my own visual journal. The people I met along the way, along with what I’d learned in Philadelphia, informed all the photographs I made.

My visual essays were published in the newspaper over six consecutive days, each accompanied by short text blocks.

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column