Recently I have been revisiting some urban photography from nearly a year ago, when we spent time in Chicago and then in New York City. Expect a few more of these photographs over the next few days, a number of which may focus on small details of the urban landscape.
I have had this little photograph open in my image editing program for some time now, waiting to post it online. It is a simple photograph, but I connect it to several things that have some meaning to me. The scene is in the tiny yard at the home of relatives in Heidelberg, Germany, whose hospitality we enjoyed over a two-week period a couple of summers ago. On this evening we had gone outside, if I recall correctly, to eat and have some wine when I noticed this diagonal beam of light passing over the surface of the white wall and forming a shadow. As someone once wrote, “There is always something to see,” and photographs are potentially anywhere.
Worn and frequently painted front walls of urban San Francisco buildings
I have a few more in this urban/street photography set from a recent day spent photographing in San Francisco. I took the train to The City, headed north along the waterfront, then cut inland at Market Street before wandering up past Chinatown (avoiding Grant) and through North Beach before heading back to where I started. There is a lot to see on such a walk on a weekday in San Francisco!
Usually when I pass through the Chinatown area I forego the walk up touristy Grant Street, and instead cut across (and uphill!) to take smaller streets and to miss a lot of the usual stuff. There are lots of little nooks and crannies here, and the buildings offer diverse and sometimes wild visual treats. These buildings, which certainly look run down from the outside, present an incredible surface of textures and colors, much of which probably evolved by accident as people painted out the ubiquitous graffiti.
In some ways there is not much to say about this photograph and in some ways there should be much to say about it. But that’s never stopped me before… While I could say more about the subject and the circumstances of the photograph, I don’t think it is that important to do so. I’ll limit myself to saying that I made the photograph while walking through part of San Francisco and that it lies somewhere between being a “quick snap” (which it isn’t) and an image I completely understood at the moment I made it (it isn’t quite that either).
I’ve recently read some (occasionally odd) online discussions of minimalism in photography — what it is and what it isn’t. My ideas about minimalism are only partially based on visual concepts of the “ism,” and more based on my experience with musical minimalism, which I’ve known about for quite a long time. In a sense there are two threads that may ultimately arrive at a similar place. One simply tries to create an image (or other sound/visual object) from as little content as possible. Another may include denser content but rather the representing real things in an objective way it presents patterns or processes to the viewer/listener. (Composer Steve Reich’s concept comes to mind: “Music as a gradual process.”) In both cases I think the object encourages the viewer listener to look past the (often minimal) surface content of the work and into the material and structure of the thing. How it works might be more important than what it is.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
