The street, scaled for fast moving cars and trucks usually makes people look tiny and insignificant. Putting people in the foreground can make up for this by using the middle ground as a background to your subject. Take the top image, for example.
This city street is a no-man’s land; it is as alien to people as friendly to fast moving cars, and it dominates our field of view. But it also serves as a powerful photographic setting for a man crossing it, his bright red shirt and yellow jacket set off by the black asphalt. A delicate white line defining the crosswalk prescribes where the man has been, and where he must go within fifteen seconds. An immense red fire department pull box, awaits him like a unwelcoming crossing guard.
The window at airport departure lounge offers a box seat’s view of a vast space of another kind, one hosting a mechanized ballet of miniature tractors, trucks, and wagons, strung together like marionettes and pirouetting around a prima ballerina, the beautiful airliner. Their dance on the tarmac distracts patrons from the discomforts of the crowded departure lounge while enhancing their anticipation of embarking on a voyage, much as in former times soaring arched concourses celebrated departures and arrivals on ships and trains.
At a rural Mom and Pop service station the owner fills our tank, unaware that she has an audience, us. This middle-aged woman has been toughened by decades of wrangling gasoline hoses and nozzles. Our car’s rear window provides us a cinematic view of her as she moves from left to right across a wide screen. Like an actor in a western, her nozzle is gripped for action. Service stations, as they were once called, were places where people and cars co-existed politely. You would have your windows cleaned and oil checked while you waited in the comfort of your car. If you were lost, directions and maps were gladly provided.
Driving over this bridge for the first time, I recalled when, as a young child, I was read a children’s story illustrating the Biblical lesson of Jonah and the whale. Jonah was swallowed by a whale while out swimming. The illustration portrayed a terrified Jonah going down a large ribbed tunnel, the whale’s throat. The story had an unexpected happy ending, though. Jonah was saved when the whale regurgitated him onto a beach, unharmed. The story is symbolic with many interpretations, but I had nightmares about it for weeks, and now every time I cross this bridge I think of being swallowed by a large fish.
Our eyes scan the scene that appears before us as we come to a stop at an intersection in downtown Houston. Twisting our heads to the right, we try to grasp the complexity and purpose of the repeating patterns of steel beams and concrete monoliths woven together like part of a monumental piece of abstract sculpture. The traffic signal changes and as we drive away, and with a final glance we see the tiny helmeted men working among the huge steel beams billboarding the builder’s name, MOSHER.
Everything about this space speaks to the conversation about streets for people. It is as welcoming to pedestrians as it is alien to automobiles. This is not empty space; life here is implied by the ascending stair, open shuttered window, and teeming paving stones. A humble manhole cover is an agreeable accent, like a medallion assigned to a prominent place signifying access to something important.
The foreground poster kiosk has a major part to play in an implied drama before us. The setting reminds us of European experimental film stage sets: a dominant stair occupies almost the entire stage (in this case, the street is the stage). A middle aged man who we have anticipated, enters the scene from upstage, a commanding place at the top of the stair. He descends the stair accompanied by a large black dog. Drama infuses the scene: the stair is dark, the street is black, and the man and dog are not immediately apparent as they move down toward the young lovers.
This is the Arabian desert during an approaching winter dust storm, not unlike like the storm Vigo Mortensen rode Hidalgo through in the film of the same name, Hidalgo. I was on my way to an airport (the tower at the end of the rainbow) and needed to cover the ten miles or so quickly to avoid being caught in the blinding storm. Luckily, traffic was light, the road brand new, and a speed limit non-existent.
