Finding the Time - Rolls 115 & 116

Something I have recently begun to realize about myself is that I require structure in order to do unstructured things. It is much easier for me to write a blog post at work, in the little spaces of time between printing photos and developing film, than to write it at home on a Sunday, with the whole day free and available to me. I can't just schedule a time to write, but as long as I have moments I can steal away from something else I'm good to go. This applies to the act of photographing as well; if I worked from home and had all week to go shooting I'd struggle to organize my day logically, but having normal hours to work around helps guide me towards natural times to take photos, usually during lunch or in the evening. This was the case one Friday when Jesus and I took our lunch break at the same time, driving south past Sample Street in the hopes of finding interesting things to shoot. As it happened, the very first street we parked on grabbed my attention, and I composed a photo there, drawn to the stillness and silence at the edge of the neighborhood. Since beginning to use medium format film I have found myself able to achieve a greater depth in my images, and that quality is present here; I love the way that the power lines take my eye from the edge of the photo to the center and then back out, remaining clear far into the distance. The higher quality also allows little details, like the two satellite dishes on the roof, to stand out and have their place in the overall scene, emphasizing yet again that in the Ordered World, every photographic element and form is part of a structured whole, intentional in its appearance and placement.

Edward Street, South Bend, Indiana.

I shot through the roll in the time it took Jesus to take about three photos (not unusual, as he's more methodical and intentional than I am), and we drove over to a seemingly abandoned warehouse parking lot. Fall colors were beginning to show up amongst the varied greens of overgrown vines and bushes, and I took two shots of the building that I am pleased with. Both shots show off Ektar 100's ability to reproduce bright colors; I especially like the tangled plants spilling over the front of the building in the first photo, while the grungy reddish-orange of the garage door in the second plays off of the similarly-colored vines beautifully. Many photos depicting the rusted decay of the Midwest tend to fall into the trap of being rather drab, and these shots are effective in part because they avoid that stereotype entirely.

South Walnut Street, South Bend, Indiana.

Untitled.

The spiritual high point of this shoot came when I turned away from the abandoned building, walking across the parking lot to some trees bordered by a fence in the back. Here the changing colors were even more visible, and I composed a photo of a tree turned fully yellow; the final photo approaches abstraction, with splashes of yellow, green, and even red evenly distributed throughout the frame. The texture of the metal fence in the background helps add to this abstract feel—at a different time I or Jesus may have chosen to shoot the fence on its own as an Extraction—and overall I get a very calm feeling from the photo, a spiritual presence emanating from the natural surroundings, despite its location in an industrial area. I believe this spiritual presence is what I responded to when I chose to take this photo, and it was an ideal way to end our lunch shoot, a refreshing moment before we headed back and tackled the end of the work week.

Untitled.

I developed the first roll I had shot when I got back to Gene's, and while I did have the photo I showed here and several others that were ok, I was disappointed with many of the images. I decided, then, that since the weather remained overcast and the light was the same, I would simply go back after work and retake one of the photos I really wanted, a task made doubly easy because I still had half of my current roll unshot. After retaking that specific photo (one which ultimately came out just ok) I began to drive around more, in hopes of finishing my roll. I searched unsuccessfully for a moment, taking only one more shot, before coming across an interesting set of buildings on nearby Indiana Avenue, where I took three photos. Of those three, two stand out to me—one of them looking down the street, a faded mural taking up most of the frame, and one a close-up of a sign in the window of that building. These photos work for entirely opposite reasons; the South Side Electric photo has that sense of depth I mentioned earlier, streetlights and cars stretching to infinity at the center of the photo. In contrast, the shot of the Top Value Stamps sign is a nearly-flat plane, windows and textures and reflections compressed into two dimensions. I think that these photos might work together in a diptych, representing two different views of the same subject and contrasting in composition. I am happy with them, and happy with my shooting from that day; as my time working on What My Left Hand is Doing grew, so did the number of ways I was able to carve out time for my personal practice of creating, accomplishing another one of the many goals I had in mind for the project.

South Side Electric, West Indiana Avenue, South Bend, Indiana.

Top Value Stamps, South Bend, Indiana.