“Rivets and Rust” — Detail of weathered and distressed steel structure on the Steel Bridge, Portland, Oregon
I made this photograph at about the same time as another one that I posted recently — it also featured a close-up view of the weathered structure of an old steel bridge with rivets, colorful stains, and lots of weathering.
Whether the specific location is all that important is debatable, but I made the photograph on the “Steel Bridge” (that’s actually its name), over the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. This is an old and quite busy structure, and it is full of fascinating little vignettes.
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“Detail, Steel Bridge ” — Structural detail of the Steel Bridge, Portland, Oregon
This might be the most unimaginatively named steel bridge in the United States — as far as I can tell it is actually called “Steel Bridge.” Which it is. The bridge crosses the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, where its double-deck structure (with a center section that can be raised) carries trains, cars, pedestrians, bicycles, and rapid transit across the water. When we visited we joined the pedestrians, which gave me a chance to look at the structure close up.
Old distressed and weathered structures like this intrigue me, and I know I’m not the only photographer who has this interest. Sometimes I imagine the contrast between some engineer crafting very careful and precise design drawings of the structure and its smaller elements, producing materials that reflect the conceptual perfection of such structures… and the real-world reality the creeps in over the long life of such structures. The latter is visible here in the multiple layers of paint, now marked by stain patterns and split open to reveal rust.
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Weathered and cracked numbers painted on the wall of an old San Francisco hotel.
Photographs like this one have, at least for me, several purposes or rationales. To some extent, walking into a regular city environment and looking for little visual odds and ends is an important exercise in visual awareness. It is so easy to walk through such places and not pay a lot of attention, and when you do so while searching for images you see things that you’d otherwise miss. It is also interesting, I think, to “excerpt” small things from their larger context. (This bit of signage, is small enough that you might barely notice it if you took in the whole building at once.) With this one there is also a bit of that odd characteristic of some photographs, where their age — or the age of the subject — becomes somewhat interesting on its own.
So, what is it? It is a bit of a hand-painted street number sign on a very old (and somewhat iconic) building on a street in San Francisco that I often walk on these street photography visits. What else is it? It is color and form, abstracted to some extent from its original context. But not entirely abstracted, since if you look closely you might notice the extremely weathered and cracked paint and you might wonder about the history of this little bit of a sign, especially in an era when one-of-a-kind hand-painted signage is increasingly replaced by industrial signage.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
A portion of an old sign on the wall of a business.
From what I can tell, I’m not the only photographer who is occasionally distracted by subjects like this, nor the only photographer who photographs odd signs. I came across this one on a wall as I walked through an area of San Francisco. At this point, I suspect that the sign is largely forgotten — it was hidden behind a truck in an area along the fringe of a gas station.
There are several things that can be fun or interesting about these signs. For one, I’m intrigued by signs that are not associated with “name” businesses or products, but which are truly one-of-a-kind. Typically this means that they were built and/or painted by hand, and often some of the rough edges show. (Judging by the dark areas on the letters, I suspect that this wall was tagged, and someone painted the main wall but left the text of the sign “as is.”) The distressed quality of the wall is also interesting, with its peeling and fading paint. Finally, taken out of context like this, the letters of signs can become disembodied and divorced from their literal meaning… and they sometimes start to look rather odd.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
