More things from my everyday objects series. These are all things I found around DC in my peregrinations on my way to and from work. They all have a theme of “two” in them – two faces, two paper boxes, two trash cans.
Two Heads
The sibling rivalry is in the two newspapers themselves represented in the two boxes – the Post and the Times. The Post is considered by many to be the “paper of record” for Washington DC, whereas the Times is a partisan hack with an extremely conservative bent, owned by a highly suspect organization (the Unification Church aka the Moonies). Depending on your political bent, the Post is a liberal shill and the Times a bastion of integrity. Either way, they co-exist in a shrinking market and both are struggling to find their feet in the post-internet age.
Sibling Rivalry – Two Paper Boxes
I call this last one two twins because there was by happy accident two people of parallel size to the trash cans, both striking the same pose in the background. It made for a serendipitous symmetry.
Many photographers complain about “I don’t have anything to photograph where I live… there’s nothing interesting, blah blah blah… I get tired of seeing the same things over and over again”. If you’re getting tired of seeing the same things over again, then you’re not looking right. Not only are you not paying attention to what’s around you, but you’re failing to observe change in your environment and to record that change, which is one of the greatest functions a photographer can fulfill.
Case in point: two images of the same house, taken about two years apart. The first image is the earlier one. I was foremost interested in the gas meter as an organic pattern against the rigid geometry of the red brick and the white window at the time I took this one. The window and the gas meter were each singular objects set off against the dark, weathered red of the wall. At a bright and cloudless sunset, the meter casts a long shadow, further repeating its organic pattern.
Gas Meter, Red Wall, V Street
Returning two years later, the house has been re-painted, this time in BRIGHT red, along with the gas meter plumbing and the bollards protecting it. Instead of looking at singular items tightly framed, this time I pulled back a bit and gave the scene a narrative – there’s a person visible inside the bars of the one window, the other window closed. The lighting is flat from an overcast sky, pushing the drama of the scene into the deeply saturated colors and the enigma of the house – who is that person inside? how did they get in there when there is no visible door? Why is the one window bricked up but the other one open?
Red Wall, Window
By re-visiting the same subjects, we not only learn to see them, but to see them differently instead of as static, unchanging objects. It also helps with story-telling and narrative development. Being able to tell a story with an image is one of the key differentiators between a factual record (“on this date, this building/car/person/plant/animal looked like this”) and an artistic output (“why does this look the way it does? Who is that? Why are they there? Why are they doing what they are doing?”). I think that we should all strive for that artistic output and not just factual recording (not that there is no value in recording of facts – we need facts recorded!).
This is one aspect of photography that I would hope to help inspire my students toward, as an educator. But it’s also the hardest thing to teach – photographic vision is something that has to happen, organically, natively, within the individual photographer. The best you can hope for is to provide exercises to stimulate them in the direction of building their vision, and to provide constructive critical feedback to focus that energy.
If you recall my earlier posts of the World Health Organization/Pan-American Health Organization headquarters building, I like architectural abstracts. These are some color abstracts I shot on two different excursions – one down to the National Mall at sunset, and the other on my routine walk home from work.
The African-American History museum is still a work in progress – I think it is slated to open in 2016, but it could be 2017 or even 2018 before it is ready for visitors, even if the structure is finished (which it appears will be true sometime this year, from the look of it). The building design is made to look like a traditional African crown with three tiers of bronze-colored mesh. The repeating pattern of the mesh screening lends itself extremely well to abstraction, and the missing panels (from the architectural renderings on the signs outside the museum, they are in fact missing/uninstalled, and not intentionally empty) add a geometric counterpoint.
African-American History Museum, Lamp
It’s nice to see that DC is finally getting some real architectural gems, and is not just filled with Classical-revival, Victorian, and Modern Industrial glass boxes. On a certain level it’s too bad the Corcoran was not able to get their financial act together several years ago and build the Frank Gehry addition to the school they wanted, as that would have been quite a striking change to the streetscape.
African-American Museum, Sky
Although not strictly architectural, I thought the geometric forms of the crane against the solid blue sky made for a nice abstract and fit well with the overall theme; after all, it is a construction crane.
Miller-Long DC crane
Far be it for me to accuse George Washington University of being architecturally avant-garde; most of their buildings blend in to the DC streetscape with an ennui-inducing banality. But their 1970s and 1980s brown-brick boxes do have some worthwhile details that break the monotony and catch the eye. Take this stairwell, for instance – the walls are blue, which pops out against the brown brick facade and dark bronze-color window trimming. And easily overlooked, the blue stairwell provides some continuity by breaking the space between the facades, each of which has a different styling for their windows. Without the stairwell, the contrast would be in high relief, and we’d think something went wrong during construction and/or they ran out of money and had to switch styles when they turned the corner.
Glass Stairwell, GW
This glass tower thrusts into the sky like the prow of an ocean liner, cleaving the plane of the facade like an Arctic icebreaker clearing the channel into Archangelsk through a wall of sea ice (ok, I’m being a tad dramatic but I wanted SOMETHING to say about it).
I often go on walkabouts on my way home from work with the Rollei in tow. I’m always impressed by the array of graffiti that’s been put up, and how it is becoming an accepted art form, with entire murals done in “graffiti style”. Here are some finds, most of them in a single alley off 14th Street.
I’m particularly taken with this segment of the mural, because of the optical illusion. If you de-focus just a little bit so you lose the texture of the stucco, it really looks like someone has made a GIANT tag on top of an actual apartment building.
Optical Illusion
I forget exactly where the two-headed Llama is located, but it’s near the alley mural. Very different texture and style, obviously not the same artist (the Llamas are a stencil, whereas the mural is almost entirely freehand). But Llamas are always cute.
Two Llamas
I don’t know if the stencil is an add-on to the mural by the artist, or if someone else came along and tagged it on top of the mural. But the statement is both enigmatic and profound: “What you risk reveals what you value”.
What You Risk
Another M.C. Escher-esque optical illusion in the mural- when you first look at it you see a redhead with long, flaming hair streaming behind. Then you realize it’s a head with a chicken next to it. But it’s hard to keep seeing the chicken, and easy to go back to seeing the redhead alone.
Another pairing of iPhone vs. Rollei in the battle of “the best camera is the camera you have”:
Mother Mary Passthru, RolleiMother Mary Passthru, iPhone
I was lucky that I got back around with the Rollei to take this shot because within a week of my return with the Rollei, construction crews had started work on the building and Mother Mary of the Takeout Passthru, the not-so-baby Jesus and the One-Eyed Wonder beneath them had been removed and replaced by a fresh sheet of plywood. Gone was the shrine to the blessed deli, replaced by the altar of rapid gentrification.
A while back I posted an item about sometimes the best camera is the camera you have with you at the time you need to take a picture. Certainly, there may be other cameras that are better suited to the task at hand, but they don’t do you any good if you don’t have them with you. To whit, the first image. I came upon this bit of graffiti in an alley between two buildings. It’s almost as if it were an art installation in itself, the way it’s situated. When I first saw it, the camera I had on hand was my iPhone. It certainly did a good job of capturing the scene.
I promised to come back with my Rolleiflex to photograph it again, to see how different the two cameras’ visions were, and how they rendered the scene differently.
Graffiti, 14th & Corcoran
It’s not really a fair comparison, given that the sensor for the iPhone is the size of a Q-tip, if that, and the film in my Rolleiflex is 2 1/4 inches square, or about 300 times the size. Also, the lens has a different field of view- the iPhone is somewhere between a 28mm and 35mm lens’ field of view (moderately wide-angle), translated into 35mm equivalent, whereas the lens on my Rollei is a “normal” (50mm equivalent). The two cameras give very different renderings of the scene – the iPhone gives you much more of a sense of the space, whereas the Rollei makes the graffiti the star of the show.
Graffiti, 14th & Corcoran, Door
Here is the locked gateway to the space where the graffiti is. Now you can get a sense of the drama of it – it’s hidden behind a locked gate, guarded like some treasure on display at more than an arm’s distance.
I took the Tele-Rolleiflex with me to the zoo the other weekend. I didn’t know quite what I would be able to get good shots of and not, but I tried anyway. The one animal I could get close enough to get a good shot of while still outdoors in good light was, fortuitously enough, the Giant Panda – I think this one is Tian Tian, the male panda.
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