Tuesday, January 22, 2013

the golden arches in black and white


This isn't the first time that the electricity junction box thingy outside Gingergrass has features here - but no leaping ballerina this time, but something much more puzzling: a small, badly stuck black and white and by now tatty and torn image of a Macdonalds, somewhere.  Quite apart from its implicit sardonic dialogue with my Vietnamese Chicken Salad, it was trying, of course, to wedge its way into my class prep (on photography as art; on photography's anxious relations with "art," and why it matters, anyway.  Or rather, to whom).  The answer, here, is a totally subjective one: dependent on muted color, and its capacity to puzzle.  And accident.  I don't know how I managed to bleach out the roadway so effectively (no photoshop manipulation there), but the fact of having done so gives me pleasure through serendipity.

I was actually wanting to take a photo that was unambiguously "straight photography," and had homed in on some very fetching sewer pipes for the purpose.  For those of you who might be suffering from house-lust every time I post an image of our soon-to-be-new-home, there is, indeed, the question of a long sewer line cheerfully said to be "in failure" that needs to be replaced before we move in.  These are not our sewer pipes, but the very sight of them cheers me up, since they are (unlike the ones that are being replaced) implacably Solid.  I'll spare you my more boring efforts to make them mimic Paul Strand.



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