A camera on Hitt Street

I took this image quickly, on the fly, without much time to think or to compose.  But I like it.  When I look at it I imagine some film noir or expressionist filmmaker, plying his trade on a darkened, European sidestreet in the 1930s or 40s.  Perhaps Fritz Lang filming a scene from M, or Orson Welles working on The Third Man.  Alas, it is only fellow photographer Tony Irons photographing a building on Hitt Street..."the fancy cannot cheat so well." 

Laundromat on Garth and Business Loop

Moving from the laundromat image in my last post to the image in this post is a bit like lifting the needle and turning off the turntable, only to fire up the Ipod.  Or putting down the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel and picking up a copy of The Economist.  Well, it illustrates two things very well.  The changing face of Columbia within a space of eleven or twelve years, and the apparent dichotomy in my own approach between the time I took the photograph on Paris Avenue and last Monday night when I took this image in a strip mall just off of Garth.  The architecture, the signage and the very construction of the building lack the warmth, character, and voice of the other laundromat in the last post.  The other laundromat had several different hand-painted signs that each made a democratic appeal to the neighborhood to come in and wash their clothes.  This one simply states "Drop Off Service."  My approach is tellingly different as well.  In 2000, when I photographed the laundromat on Paris, I was presumably shooting some Ilford HP-5 through a Nikon N2000, on a tripod.  I was trying to include the signage, the street sign, but also some of Paris Avenue to give the image some context and some atmosphere.  In the newer image, I am preoccupied with keeping the vertical lines vertical and avoiding any linear distortion.  Since the building was not lit from the front I am more interested in the light coming out of the laundromat and illuminating the painted letters from behind.  But the approach simply isn't as passionate as the approach of ten years ago.  Perhaps I need to listen to more vinyl, and put away the itunes for a while.

Laundromat on Paris

The laundromat.   Have you noticed that Columbia doesn't seem to have as many of these as it used to?  The laundromat, for photographers, is as much a symbol and a visual magnet as it is a cliche.  I photographed this laundromat on Paris Avenue back in about 1999 or 2000, before it closed.  I never printed the image, never even scanned it, until last week.  I think I resisted ever looking closely at it because so many night photographers like to photograph laundromats, especially the all-night laundromats.  Why?  I'm not sure.  Perhaps because they are open all night, with lights on, doors open, generally empty and beckoning in a somnambulistic, Murakami-esque, kind of way.  Seems like there used to be one next door to Shakespeare's Pizza (the Lost Sock?), another next to the ex-location of the International Cafe on Hitt Street, one on Rogers Street across from Wilson's Meat, the Eastgate Laundry next to Eastgate IGA, and then this one on Paris.  Now the closest laundromat to downtown Columbia is out on Conley Road.  I know all of this because for a month or two I was without a washer, and had to make the trek out to east Columbia just to wash my clothes.  So why did they all disappear?  And will there ever be another one with as much vintage character as this one had?  Probably not.  If this laundromat were still here, I'm pretty sure I'd stop in, on a warm, summer night like tonight, just to briefly inhabit the atmosphere.