Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Crown of Roses

Squaring with Google? No, not a rant about Google threatening privacy or innovation but an unexpected benefit from the Street View feature of Google Maps.

Almost nothing in the “Crown of Roses” image above is square with anything else. Working from memory in Lightroom, I know that the girl was walking up hill but surely the green utility box can’t be tilted so far off the vertical? If I use the side of the green box as a plumb line then the slope of the hill disappears, the girl looks to be headed for a busted nose on the sidewalk, and I lose 25% or more of the image to the crop! I compromise and post that to the Saturday Morning, Austin web gallery but I am not happy about it.

Today, in love with the rich colors, I decide to use the image for a blog posting but the angles are still nagging me: I want the picture to be true but how can I know for sure? If only I had taken a wide angle context shot to use as a reference! And then it occurs to me that this is a “street” photograph in a U.S. city and that I should therefore be able to find the location in Google Maps and compare with that …

Google’s street image capture for Austin was made a few years ago, before the skyline went through its latest growth spurt, but the mural was already there, cracks and all. You can see for yourself by bringing up Google Maps for 640 San Jacinto, Austin, TX and switching to Street View; the painted armadillo is walking on the level and the utility box, while perpendicular to the sidewalk, is significantly off vertical. I make the adjustment to match reality rather than my perception of it and that’s what you see here. The out-of-kilter angles only add to the surreal quality.

Now I am wondering what else I might use Google’s Street View for; scouting for locations maybe?

Dark trees and light, Rio Hondo valley

I have joked that some of my photographs are rip-offs of modernist paintings (see Tow Away Zone) but they are not. Photography has been in conversation with painting since its invention; the two art forms riff off each other rather than rip off. In this case, modernist painting – abstract expressionism and minimalism in particular – have cleared the path that allows the image to be observed in the field and presented here.

But, while this photograph may have the appearance of being like a modernist painting, it is not a modernist image. This is not art talking about art, this is not art enshrining the platonic ideal of ‘flatness’, this is not art circling the void of absent meaning; this is of and about the presence of light and color in the trees of a mountain valley. This was made not with brush strokes from the imagination or intellect but with sunlight blocked by, and reflected from, trees.

There are places that affect your spirit for which a straight photograph cannot do justice; the road side stream and trees in this New Mexico valley is one of those places. The camera has been moved such that the light fell on the silicon to capture the way it fell on the mind.