Two different takes on the WHO building downtown DC. This time shot in bright, strong, contrasty sunlight. Due to the geometry of the building I was aiming for geometric abstractions, composing so the context of the structure was absent and what is visible has to be taken non-literally.
World Health Organization, Cylinder
Pointing the camera vertically to create these images really pushes the perception into unreality – you’re dealing with three texture sets, not anything particularly identifiable. Mid-century architecture like this is a rare commodity in DC – most buildings are either glass-and-steel cubes, neoclassical faux-palaces, or Art Deco boxes of varying degrees of interest and value, so this really stands out.
This is a one-off, as it stylistically doesn’t really fit with the rest of the Commuter Diary series. But it’s a really great image, so I’m posting it. I saw this young man dozing off on the bus on my way home from work the other day. It’s very representative of that kind of moment all of us have had when riding public transit – you’re tired, in need of a rest, and hoping you won’t oversleep your stop.
So far I’ve mostly been focusing on the infrastructure of commuting – the trains, the buses, the buildings, the mechanical bits. Here are a few shots of the human side – the reason the infrastructure exists in the first place.
It’s an all-too-common sight on the train or the bus – someone taking up two seats with their stuff. It doesn’t really matter when the train is more empty than not, but on a busy, full train during rush hour, well… it’s downright rude. Thus, the question gets asked, even if only in an internal monologue – “did your bag also buy a ticket?”. Did Your Bag Buy a Ticket?
Another very common part of the commuting experience is waiting. Waiting for the bus, waiting for the train, waiting for someone to come pick you up at the bus stop or train station. With the omnipresence of smartphones, nobody reads books or newspapers any more – instead it’s little glowing screens that light up their face with a deathly pallor as they hone in with a zombie-like intensity on the images and text being fed to them by an iSomething.
Waiting With Phone
An interesting side effect of the way I take these photos is seeing what does and doesn’t move over time. This poor woman looks like she has hair of concrete as her face moves but her hair doesn’t.
I often use the Dupont Circle metro station not so much as a part of my commute but for going out on weekends or after work. These images are actually in a bit of a reverse order from how they were taken, going from streetside to platform. Dupont Circle’s escalator is legendary for its length – it is a very steep, very long escalator, but NOT, all legends to the contrary, the longest in the Metro system. The longest is actually at one of the outer suburban stations, Glenmont. Bethesda is also very long and very steep, longer than Dupont. Once I timed it to prove to a friend that Bethesda is longer, and it takes some 30 seconds longer to ride the Bethesda escalator to the top than the Dupont Circle escalator.
The entrance to the Dupont Circle station on the Q Street side is the one that has the long, deep escalators. It also has a relatively unique architecture with a circular aperture. Inscribed in the marble around the entrance shaft is a quote from Walt Whitman about the soldiers he nursed in the Civil War hospitals of Washington DC. The inscription was added in 2006 to honor the caregivers who gave so much of themselves in the fight against AIDS – Dupont Circle was particularly ravaged by that scourge, having been the heart of the gay community in DC. While perhaps no longer the geographic center of the gay community (it has moved to other, cheaper, and more geographically dispersed locations as times and attitudes have changed), Dupont Circle is still the spiritual home.
Dupont Escalator, Topside
The quotation reads:
Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night — some are so young;
Some suffer so much — I recall the experience sweet and sad . . .
The poem in question, first published in 1865 as part of a collection called “Drum-Tips”, was originally titled “The Dresser”, and re-named “The Wound-Dresser” in later publications. In my image, the inscription is not legible, but the escalator tops plunge over the precipice of the entrance like a waterfall into a cavern, taking you down into the unknown.
The view looking up the escalator is equally vertiginous. Exiting at night you emerge from the confined but bright space of the underground into a dark circle of the open night sky. You’re falling UP into a different unknown.
Dupont, Looking Up
Turning around and looking back down at where you came from, it’s a bit like Orpheus and Eurydice or Lot’s Wife, looking back at whence you came. Fortunately, the only time there’s instant regret is in the depth of winter when it’s 15 degrees F outside and the wind is whipping your face. And you don’t turn into a pillar of salt.
Looking Down, Dupont
The flow of traffic up the escalator at the Dupont Circle platform:
Dupont Circle Platform
Boarding the train:
Entering Car
Sorry if I can’t wax poetic for every image. It’s just as the mood strikes and the juices flow. Maybe if I have a show of this work I’ll edit my better bits of commentary out of the blog into quotes on the wall as captions for the images.
Tangentially related to my commuter diary in that it’s something I pass frequently, here are some shots of the World Health Organization’s offices in DC. The mid-century design lends itself extremely well to composing abstracts.
At the edge of the lawn, there is a ring of black polished marble creating a border with the concrete pavers of the plaza. It was raining that day, and the marble was particularly reflective, so I composed a frame that shows the cylindrical drum structure reflected at a tangential curve running through the marble band bisecting the frame. It’s a presentation of contrasts in textures, organic vs man-made, structure and chaos.
Pavers, Reflection, Grass
Many people feel that you can only take photos in certain weather/lighting conditions. Except for the getting wet/cold bit, I like photographing in the weather – it’s a different kind of light, creating different textures and volumes from the same subjects. I plan on heading back with my camera on a nice sunny day and shooting the building again with deep, long shadows making the structure much more abstract and contrasty. I like being versatile in my photographic style, and I like recording light on subjects as I see it when I see it – if that means photographing at noon on a bright sunny day, so be it. Now, I may be out somewhere at noon on a cloudless sunny day and see something and say, wow- that’s an interesting subject, but I can’t get the shot I want because the contrast is too harsh. If that’s the case I won’t waste the film and I’ll come back another day. But by the same token, I’m not going to play refusenik and leave my camera at home between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm because the light is ‘too harsh’. Ditto cloudy days, rainy days, snowy days… there’s something to be seen and photographed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you can’t do it if you don’t have your camera.
Here are two different crops of the drum and tower structures of the WHO building.
WHO building
On the one hand, the tighter crop is more abstract, being only about contrasts of pattern and texture, sharp focus and soft-focus, but the square uncropped image has more breathing room and gives you more of a sense of what you’re looking at. I don’t know that you need to be able to read the buildings as buildings in order to get the most out of the image – it could even be distracting/attenuating because you stop thinking about what you’re seeing once you KNOW what you’re looking at.
Another installment in the commuter diary. I’m debating if they really belong in the series because there are some things (the buildings and other static structures) that are relatively sharp, and it’s just the moving objects (people and cars) that are less distinct. They are also not so much from a public transit perspective as they are a pedestrian perspective. For now, while I build the project, they’re in, but they may come out later.
Street Crossing, Rain
These two definitely belong together, and they definitely feel like walking home at night in the rain. Waiting for the light to change, traffic zipping by.
Lone Pedestrian
Here a lone pedestrian waits for the light on the other side of the street, while the ghostly blurs of other pedestrians pass by on their way to other places and times. But even she is not clear, because she waits resonant with expectation for the changing of the signal.
I’ve been playing around with this idea for a while. I don’t know that there’s anything particularly new about what I’m doing, either subject-wise or with technique. But I’m doing it as an exercise in freeing myself up creatively, forcing myself to be open to happy accident, and not getting hidebound with notions of what photography “should” look like. Photography is capable of recording and compressing time into a single frame, and I’m interested in exploring how we react and respond to seeing that. It’s not what we expect when we look at a photograph- we expect very short “frozen” moments, 1/250th of a second, blur-free, movement-free, sharp, literal. These photos are NOT that. They’re shot in B – long exposures made by my pushing the shutter button and letting go when I’ve decided I’ve captured “enough”, anywhere from a couple of seconds to closing in on a minute. So much can happen in just one minute.
Ignoring the Map
I’m trying to capture the experience of being a regular commuter on public transportation. It’s an impressionistic approach to the concept, recording the passage of time and the movement through space of the vehicles and people in a public transit system. Rail system maps are in every car on every train in every city in the world that has a public rail system. It’s easy to separate the tourists from the commuters as the tourists are pouring over every detail of the map, and the commuters are doing their best to ignore it and everything and everyone else around them.
Foggy Bottom Metro
This is the view of the platform with a train at the station at Foggy Bottom, looking down the Up escalator. With the train relatively stationary, the zig-zaggy lightning-bolt forms of the station lamps captures the movement of my breathing as the camera hangs against my body. Even when standing still, movement is all around you, but that’s the nature of public transit, isn’t it? It’s all about constant movement, circulating people from one end of town to the other.
Pole Hanger
Every rail system (and bus system for that matter) has a means to support people who are standing while riding. The poles are a terrific convenience while riding, and a terrific obstacle when trying to exit. They grow near doors like chromed branchless brambles that collect passengers who are ready and waiting by the door for THEIR stop, transforming to boulders in the current throwing eddies and whirlpools in the tidal flow of commuters on and off the carriage.
Well, ok, I actually shot these on the 30th of December, but they got processed today. This is perhaps the best three-frame panorama I’ve shot with the Rollei panorama adapter so far. It’s ALMOST seamless.
Ice Rink Panorama
This is the ice rink they set up every winter in the fountain of the National Gallery of Art’s Sculpture Garden. The imposing building in the background is the National Archives.
This was the result of a rainy-day walkabout in my neighborhood.
Yet another style of Siamese stand-pipe – this time beaded with rain water. It will go into my collection of ordinary objects.
Siamese Standpipe, Rain
The flower vendor was sheltering from the rain under the awning of a Five Guys burger joint.
Roses, 5 Dollars
A whole family, waiting for something (there’s not a bus stop where they were standing – maybe they were waiting for someone else to come along in a car). The little boy was playing with his umbrella and the mom kept telling him to put it up or put it down, but stop swinging it around or he might poke someone with it.
Umbrella Family
While the kid didn’t hit the guy with the Starbucks cup, that’s exactly what the mom was talking about with the little boy.
Starbucks Man, in the Rain
A mom and her daughter out running an errand in the rain.
Mother, Daughter, Cyclist
I liked how the columns of the fire station were reflected faintly in the rain-slick sidewalk.
Engine Company Number 11
This half-gate stands in front of a house under renovation. I think one of the construction workers thought I was strange for wanting to take a picture of this.
I squeezed in a roll of Tri-X in my shooting with the models. I wish I had had the chance to shoot some frames of Trevor, the other model, in black and white, but such is life. Another time.
Grayson
Grayson has a very commanding gaze and makes for a great portrait subject. He uses this to compensate for an otherwise willowy physique (not that there’s anything wrong with willowy).
Grayson
We shot all of these down under the Whitehurst Freeway where it runs parallel to the Potomac River on the edge of Georgetown. Despite the deep shade it creates, it makes for some beautiful, soft light.
Grayson
The tank top reads “I like bad boys” in French. It was Grayson’s own choice of wardrobe – very fun and cheeky.
Grayson
The last shot was at a boarded-up building tucked away under the freeway. I’m surprised given the value of real estate in Georgetown that such a place could exist. Whatever, it makes for a neat backdrop for models. The bottle of Fat Tire was found en-situ, and trust me, nobody drank from it.
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