Another sign of change and transformation is the ebb and flow of graffiti. My latest find was this:
Any Make or Model (Black is Beautiful)
I loved the serendipitous juxtaposition of the advertisement wording for the cellphone repair shop and the graffiti – “Any Make, Any Model… Black is Beautiful”. There’s truth in accidents. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident.
A generic graffiti tag on a bricked-up window of a house. This is casual art, that has its own accidental grace and beauty despite not having any great aspiration beyond marking territory or gang initiation.
Window, Graffiti, 15thStreet
Then there’s graffiti that is transformed from simple defacement by virtue of adopting the form and structure of the object upon which it is inscribed, like this manhole cover.
Graffiti-inscribed Manhole Cover
Some street art I found in Toronto. There’s a point where graffiti transcends defacement of property and really does become art in itself. Graffiti
More graffiti as street art. There is part of this wall that I intentionally cropped out as it makes a statement that I don’t know I’d want to make or pass on (decapitated nude female torso).
Graffiti, Chain Link Fence, Twilight
Back to simplicity, this bit speaks to collective identity questions – the figure transforms the Washington DC city flag of three stars over two bars into a humanoid with a hand for a head. Politics, ethnicity, religion, all rolled into a piece of temporary public art (the wall upon which this figure was painted has been gentrified into several very expensive restaurants).
Graffiti, DC Flag Design, 14th Street
The camera of record is a Rolleiflex 2.8E, and the films used are FP4+ for b/w and Kodak Ektar 100 and Portra 160 for color.
Ok, it’s far from a comprehensive survey of the city by night, but whaddya want, I only had a single night for night shooting, so I confined myself to where I could walk to from my apartment.
One of the great things about where we (my father and I) stayed was the fact we were in walking distance of just about everything, from the subway to all the historical buildings and neighborhoods. Notre Dame was a stone’s throw away, across the bridge. Here is the rear view from the approach I took over the Pont St. Louis.
Notre Dame, Rear View, Night
The front facade is fully illuminated at night, and they have built a set of large risers in the plaza in front that if nothing else serve as a great camera platform for photographing the towers. The night I was out shooting was the night of the full moon, so I got lucky and was able to get this shot of the tower and the moon.
Notre Dame, Tower, Full Moon
Another view of the towers, from a side street. It had been raining that evening, so the streets were wet giving them that Hollywood movie look.
Notre Dame, Side Street, Night
Another shot of the full moon, over a grand Hotel (Hotel in the Parisian sense of grand city residence/townhouse as opposed to place-where-you-rent-a-room-by-the-night) on the Ile de la Cite.
Full Moon Over Hotel, Ile de la Cite
The Pont St. Louis, slick with rain. This is the bridge that connects the Ile St. Louis with the Ile de la Cite.
Pont St. Louis, Night
A view of the Hotel de Ville (Paris’ City Hall) from across the Seine. The white line at the river level is created by the lights of a passing river tour boat that has flood lights on the roof to illuminate the buildings on the quays as it passes. I don’t envy the people whose apartments face the river because of that, even if the boat tours do stop sometime between 9 and 10 pm.
Hotel de Ville, Seine, Night
Another view of the bridges across the Seine. In the background on the left you can see a rather castle-like building which is La Monnaie, the old French Mint where they used to make coins.
Seine Bridges, La Monnaie, Night
The last bridge of today’s program is the Pont Louis Phillippe, which connects the end of the Ile St. Louis to the north bank of the Seine. The bridge I used every day to get to and from the subway was the Pont Marie, which abuts the middle of the Ile St. Louis. I wanted to get a view of the bridges from water level, so I went down a set of steps on the quayside of the Ile de la Cite and set up my tripod at the very bottom – you can see from the facing set of steps they descend all the way into the water (I did not test how far down they go, as I had no desire to get wet, especially at this time of year).
Pont Louis Phillippe, Steps, Night
The St. Regis cafe has a view of the Pont St. Louis. Notre Dame itself is hidden by the buildings across the bridge. On my excursion, I saw people sitting outside the cafe all evening – I returned home at nearly midnight and there were people still outside the cafe as it was closing up.
St. Regis Cafe, Night
Here’s a look into the courtyard of one of the hotels on the Rue St. Louis en l’Ile, at number 51. I looked through the doorway, which had always been closed when I walked by in the daytime, and saw the light on in the library window on the second floor, and I just had to take that picture. I love libraries (I’m sitting in one as I type this, my modest personal library of 2000 or so books), so seeing in to one had a rather Proustian effect on me.
Hotel Courtyard, 51 Rue St. Louis en L’Ile, Night
I shot all these on Kodak Portra 160 because I like how it responds to nighttime color better than Ektar. It has a less contrasty look which is good for night because night scenes are inherently contrastier than daytime scenes, and it handles overexposure better than Ektar.
I submitted a photo to a call for entries from the Eastern Sierra Center for Photography the other day, and the photo was accepted! It’s even #1 in the series. The photo is one I took a while back of the Surratt house in Washington DC. The theme of the photos was “Motels”, based on a quote by William Borroughs –
“Motel, motel, motel, broken neon arabesque, loneliness moans across the continent like fog horns over still oily water of oily rivers.”
The motel connection in my image is a little tenuous, but Mrs. Surratt took in boarders to her home to help pay the bills before she was hanged for her alleged role in the Lincoln assassination (she was the first woman ever executed in the United States for a crime she may have only ever been tangentially involved in). I also felt the mood of the scene put into image the words in the Burroughs quote.
There was a requirement that the image be made with a large format camera (one of the primary missions of the Eastern Sierra Center for Photography is the promulgation of large format photography).
Secession Sushi – The Wok ‘n Roll in the Surratt House
The photo was shot on Kodak Portra 160 with a Canham 5×7 wood field camera using a Kodak Commercial Ektar 12″ lens.
Please go visit the Eastern Sierra Center’s website and read about their very worthwhile mission – supporting the continued use of view cameras for contemporary (and future – they have a program to expose kids to view cameras!) photography.
There is now a viewing platform in the square in front of Notre Dame which makes for a great venue to watch the fire spinners and other street performers, and a nice vantage point to view the facade, but it does present an unique challenge for photographing the entire building – you can’t get far enough back to get the whole facade including the towers in one frame without using an extreme wide-angle lens and introducing lots of distortion. So second-best option was this – shoot in two frames and line them up. It ALMOST worked, but you still get some keystoning from having to shoot up to get the towers.
I was out walking around in the late afternoon and found these. I like the simple graphic compositions they inspired, combined with the long shadows being cast. They’re remnants of the old industrial component of the neighborhood that is quickly being usurped by gentrification.
Air Conditioner Cage, V StreetGas Meter, Red Wall, V Street
This is an exploration of twilight into dusk in and around the 14th Street and U Street corridors in Northwest Washington DC. All these shots were taken in the same evening, and are within walking distance of one another (although in the name of time efficiency I drove from one area to the other so I wouldn’t lose the last light in the sky).
Nellies is a gay sports bar (betcha never thought you’d hear THAT particular combination!) at the corner of 9th and U Street and Florida Avenue (U Street turns into Florida Avenue at 9th). I’ve driven by hundreds of times and always thought about photographing their lights, specifically the “OPEN” arrow on the corner. The night I started this project, I decided to shoot the building from two different angles, one to capture the general ambiance of the intersection, the other to specifically address the OPEN sign.
Nellies Sports Bar, From Florida AvenueNellies Sports Bar, From 9th Street
Around the corner from Nellies is this abandoned warehouse which has some really wild and cool and somewhat disturbing graffiti on it. I shot some of this graffiti through the chain link fence around the side lot. The disturbing piece I intentionally cropped out of the shot, as it is the nude lower half of a female body that appears to have been severed from its torso.
Graffiti, Chain Link Fence, Twilight
Over on 14th Street, we have had an explosion of new restaurants in the last five years, with a huge spate in the last year alone. Rice Restuarant is arguably the best Thai restaurant in DC, and certainly the most innovative. A good friend of mine opened it gosh, maybe ten years ago, virtually pioneering the restaurant boom in the neighborhood. Now next door to Rice is Ghibellina, an Italian joint that opened this year, and next door to that is Pearl Dive, an oyster bar, which opened perhaps 2 years ago. Le Diplomate is a French bistro across the street in what was originally a car dealership in the 1920s, then became a laundromat. Le Diplomate also opened earlier this year.
GhibellinaLe DiplomateRice Restaurant
At the intersection of 14th and Q Streets, I pointed my camera south on 14th to try and capture the energy of the neighborhood, through the traffic, the lights, the construction boom represented by the crane, and the people on the sidewalks.
Crane, 14th Street, Twilight
Here is a second version of the shot, a longer exposure, that captures the car sitting at the traffic light, then traffic taking off when the light changed. The funky stuff in the sky is a combination of reflections of the tail-lights and head-lights of the cars reflecting off the clouds and lens flare caused by the lights directly shining into the lens.
Crane, Traffic, 14th Street, Dusk
I’m not sure if I like this one well enough to keep it or if some other night I go back and try to re-shoot it. Feedback welcomed. All shots, as is becoming normal to say now, were taken with my Rolleiflex 2.8E, on Kodak Ektar 100 film. This was in part an experiment to see how well Ektar would fare against Portra 160 as a low-light film. I’ve loved Portra as a low-light film for its ability to handle mixed lighting conditions. I’d say this put to rest any thoughts of Ektar 100 being inferior- it does look different, to be sure, but I’d say it did a pretty darned good job. I think I might even prefer it in some cases.
La MoliendaPan Lourdes, in colorTree Lights, 14th StreetGlorias Pupusas
Some twilight photos taken on 14th Street in Columbia Heights. All shots were taken with my Rolleiflex 2.8E on Kodak Portra 160. This time I was using a tripod – the black and white shots were hand-held. While I was out taking these photos, I had someone from Cavalier Liquor come outside and tell me, “you didn’t get permission to take pictures”. He then broke into a smile so I knew he was just teasing. I’ll make a nice print of the picture and bring it to them, one of these days.
I also had someone approach me as to why I was photographing Gloria’s Pupuseria and Pan Lourdes. I explained to the guy I’m a photographer and I take pictures of things I find interesting. He explained his interest in why I was taking pictures with a throwaway line about 9/11 and can’t be too careful these days. As a Pentagon attack survivor, and photographer, I find the gratuitous abuse of 9/11 as an excuse for anything and everything intrusive to be highly insulting. If I were scouting potential targets for a terror attack, I sure as shootin’ wouldn’t be using a Rolleiflex on a tripod! I’d be doing what everyone else is doing and using my cellphone, to be as inconspicuous as possible. And I’d not be scouting out a Latino bakery in a transitional neighborhood. Suspicious behavior is not taking photographs – suspicious behavior is leaving a bulky bag unattended in a busy location. Photography is not a crime, and telling people to look out for photographers is up there with the porno scanners at the airport as the worst kind of security theater – it harasses innocent, law-abiding citizens and presents the illusion of “doing something” while not actually addressing real security needs.
My new batch of Kodak Portra 160 just arrived today. For a long while I thought it would remain a pipe dream to get to shoot this film again in this size, as the price had more than doubled since I first purchased it. But B&H Photo, the ultimate camera superstore, had a batch on sale, so I snapped up two boxes, hopefully enough to complete a project.
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