Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Urban Crop Circles

In the 1970’s, aliens tried to coordinate their invasion of our planet by marking farmer’s fields with hieroglyphics that only they and Led Zeppelin could understand. In the first part of the twenty first century they have begun marking their lines of attack for urban street fighting; their glyphs are smaller now, and more colorful, but no easier to comprehend.

That’s one interpretation. The more likely explanation is that Austin’s streets are about to be torn up yet again to lay a new cable or fix an old sewer line.

Anonymity - Austin Amtrak, 2010

Why do people tag buildings with graffiti? Why do people publish photography blogs? Fundamentally for the same reason: we fear being invisible, forgotten, unknown, overlooked; we fear that we may leave the world unmarked by our presence. Graffiti and blogging won’t help us much in the end, the walls we painted will fall down and our domain name registrations will lapse. In the short interlude that our signature is visible it will likely remain unrecognized by all but a handful but it is our small existentialist authentication for that brief time and those few.

But whose bust is that, high up on the right (detail below)? Who painted that there and why? The brickwork distorts the image but I don’t think it’s “W” so who is it? The profile looks familiar, I’m probably going to kick myself when I find out. Someone has me asking questions at least.

Austin Surreal

It was a case of use it or lose it, vacation time that is, so I took Friday off intending to go downtown with the camera. The day was overcast and the light flat so I postponed; Saturday morning brought the hard shadows and warm tints that I had wanted so off I went. Excluding some productive vacations, it has been 15 months since I set out to take photographs: the final step in my aesthetic recuperation.

I am happy with the results but aware that I might be too easily satisfied. Thom Hogan recently wrote an article on his site, titled “One in 76” (scroll down his 2010 News and Comments archive and you will find it), in which he says that he does not like coming home with a lot of good shots but nothing that shows he pushed the boundaries. Historically my keeper ratio has been similar to the 1 in 36 that Thom describes; my ratio yesterday was about 1 in 8 suggesting I wasn’t trying hard enough.

I have a lot of photographs of people entering or exiting a large frame like the one shown here. It’s something of a formula: find an interesting background such as a street mural or White Sands, New Mexico, or Calgary Beach, Scotland, and wait for someone to enter from stage left or stage right. This is the pattern followed by no less than 6 of the 15 images I have posted from yesterday’s expedition. It’s a good pattern, I like the images aesthetically and semanitcally, but it’s a safe approach that keeps me well inside my comfort zone: utilizing longer focal lengths and avoiding the risk of up close eye contact.

If I am to turn Saturday morning downtown into a series, going back multiple times, then I will need to go outside that comfort zone and grow a little. If I don’t then I will just end up with 16, 24 or 32 “keepers” of the same thing in different colors.

Fire zone meets crossing

Another photograph taken yesterday, another modernist painting rip-off composition, and another entry for my ‘Urban Semiotics’ project.

Is this a bomber design for Star Wars Episode VIII?

What is a fire zone? Is the concrete likely to spontaneously combust?

If a wheel chair were to hesitate too long in the red zone would the chair get towed away?

Since the yellow paint is over the red paint does that mean that a wheel chair has right of way over a fire truck?

Fire markings and drain, Arboretum, Austin 2008

If you have read any of my earlier posts you will have realized that I am not the kind of blogger who has the energy and enthusiasm to take a new picture each day to feed the blog; until now I have cheated and pulled something from the archive that I wanted to write about. Today is a new day. Today is a good day. Today was a Sunday and I had no excuses. I used my camera and here is one of the results.

In all parts of the wealthy, developed, world we have a thing about painting lines on our streets. We read them so unconsciously when driving that we don’t really see them until the first time we arrive at a complex junction in a foreign country. If you do stop and take the time to consider some of these lines they have a few jokes to tell and questions to ask that were almost certainly not intended by the rule makers that commissioned them or road gangs that laid them down.

Like the store windows series, I don’t have to go far from my house to find some paint on the street and I have a growing collection of what I have named ‘Urban Semiotics’. In this case the pull is mostly in the color and form rather than any contradictory message. The damaged red lines, the blacks and blues of the grate, and the Pollock like randomness of the grain in the road surface. The picture is a rip-off of (homage to?) modernist painting. It’s another one that my dad won’t get and I won’t be able to put my finger on why exactly I do.

[Added September 15, 2008] There are some alternative messages that can be read from this picture. Drains, grates and manhole covers all imply an underworld, a dark and unknown place, a place where monsters live. Is the fire that the red lines warn of something that might come up through the grate? Is it dangerous to stand near it? Might a bogey man pull you down?