Mummies

One cold night, just heading out for a nominally productive night of photographing downtown Columbia, Matt and I followed a whim and ventured into the Blue Note...to be met by a stage full of musical mummies.  And they were really tight....

A wet night on the Parkway

November

Until I started working on this image, I didn't know what was in it.  Certainly some T.S. Eliot, from Preludes perhaps.  And the intersection of organic and geometric shape.  And a handwritten language of branches and shadows and tangles.  A sanskrit of limbs and trees and night.  And of course, a simple, visual distillation of winter.
"The worlds revolve like ancient women, Gathering fuel in vacant lots."  --T.S. Eliot

Jazz at Orr Street Studio

A jazz trio entertained the crowd at last weekend's Access Arts 40th Anniversary Gala at Orr Street Studios.

Fence and parking lot

With just one blank, brightly lit window staring at me over the top of a fence, this house and its companions reminded me of a scene by Robert Adams or Todd Hido.  Which is more benighted, the black asphalt parking lot in front of the fence, or the vinyl sided house behind the fence?

Downtown Alley (undeveloped)

I've always been fascinated by this particular alleyway in Columbia.  The entrance to it, with the clapboard-style barbershop flanking the right hand side, is beckoning.  Especially at night, when the interior of the barber shop glows reassuringly, and a couple meager street lights illuminate select patches of brick and pavement far down the yawning alleway.  My great grandfather was a barber in the small Missouri town of Latham, down near California.  Somewhere at home my dad still has the set of whet stones that he used to keep sharp the tools of his trade.

The Dumas

Lucy's Cafe

Hitt Street by streetlight

Summertime at Ragtag Cafe

Another image in the summer's night series in downtown Columbia...Ragtag Cinema Cafe on a 95 degree evening in early August.  Only a few patrons were hardy enough to drink their beers on the patio. 

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.

Corner of Seventh and Alleyway

The uniquely-rounded corner of Chong's Oriental Market and a beckoning alleyway on a deserted, summer night, downtown Columbia.

A quiet night on Hitt Street

A quiet night on seventh street

Business Loop by Night

Columbia's business loop on a summer's night.

Alley bicycle

I saw this ten speed lurking seductively in the entrance to an alleyway last night.  It was cunningly side-lit, as if it were inhabiting a film noir.  Summertime in Columbia.

Robert Frank hankering for a pastry

An empty coffee shop, and a lighted display case full of beckoning pastries.  With a tip of the hat to Robert Frank's mesmerizing juke boxes, illuminating the American night.

Broadway Maple Tree--Different Vision

I've been scanning some images from last year, trying to understand what I was doing at that time, and why.  This was shot with my Mamiya 645, probably handheld, using my 80mm f 1.9 lens and some Ilford Delta.  It is the same patriarchal maple tree on Broadway that I blogged about back in February of this year.  The silhouetted branch is at the tenuous edge of sharpness....beyond that everything else is out of focus.  I find something very poetic and haiku-ish about this image...even more so than the last image I posted.  The lack of perfect sharpness, the curved, gnarled shape of the branch, the black sky full of flying snow.  It was a poetic scene...but I am uncertain if the sense of mystery and the ephemeral nature of the moment are adequately conveyed by the image.  I think I am searching for an understanding of the inverse relationship between technical mastery and poetic attainment.  In other words, it seems that a soft, gesture of an image can sometimes speak volumes, while a tack sharp paradigm of technical skill will generally have little of importance to say.

Tiger Hotel with spring blossoms

Another attempt at visual haiku, an act which can only be blamed on spring.  This one written with a 40-some year old Canonet GIII rangefinder.  Hence the soft glow emitted by the neon, the palpable texture of the April-night blossoms, the warmth and radiance of the scene.  I've got a series of images taken with this camera last spring; I plan to post them in sequence.  To me, this one epitomizes late April in the midwest.

The Heidelberg on a warm night

Last week I was out on a night photography shoot with my digital photo class from Access Arts Studio.  To say that we had a perfect night for shooting is an understatement.  But I must admit I was a bit envious of the crowd outside the Berg, slowly meandering in for a beer during late happy hour.  It doesn't take a crowd at Heidelberg to bespeak spring in Columbia, but it certainly is an endearing feature of a warm, spring evening in downtown Columbia.

Cafe Berlin Nightlife

Wheel of Dharma

When I saw the manhole cover, I was reminded of the Bhuddist wheel of dharma.  Unfortuntaley, the dharmacakra has eight spokes, while mine only has six.  But on the same night I also found the image of the lamp against the brick ceiling, and this does seem to have eight, shadowy spokes radiating from the center.   I don't know if these symbols, revealing themselves over the course of the night, were trying to tell me something.  Ideally there should be a third here, but I guess I didn't stay out late enough to find it.

Peace Park a la Josef Sudek

I don't know why I've never photographed in Peace Park at night.  It just didn't seem to hold much promise.  I was downtown last Tuesday night conducting a night shoot with my Access Arts photo class.  We were dawdling through campus when we walked into Peace Park and I started trying to find a spring blossoms shot.  Sometimes this is pretty hard at night, as the light is low contrast and not terribly blossom-appropriate.  In the work of Josef Sudek, the one-armed photographic "Poet of Prague", his treatment of spring blossoms and landscapes is decidedly low contrast and low key.  So I borrowed a page from his book.  Columbia will never be as romantically, fog-shroudedly photographic as Prague in the 1950s and 60s, but here is a nod to the independent vision of Mr. Sudek.

Missouri Theatre in Snow

This was the Missouri Theatre before the facelift and interior renovations which transformed it a few years ago.  The sign and its space-age font, albeit dated, has a certain, vintage appeal.  To our left of the theatre, at the time, were a shoe repair shop and Acorn Books.  I believe that the shoe repair shop has moved over to 8th street, and Acorn Books is now located out in the Marketplace off I-70.  Salt of the Earth Records used to be in the same row of shops.

Between winter and spring

A scene reminiscent of a dark, nocturnal novel by Hesse or Sartre...This was last night, a cold night in Columbia but no snow, officially spring but no rain.  Even the light was blank and existential, betraying neither the romance of a winters night, nor the warm promise of a spring evening.

Departure on Broadway

The Pasta Factory leaves its home on Broadway...all that is left is half of a broken sign, spilling its fluorescence over the Broadway sidewalk.

Movie poster on GMC van

I found this van parked on Walnut Street, the night before the True/False Film Festival started.  The symmetry of the poster balanced over the single GMC branded hubcap is what made it for me.  Something about the van also reminded me of Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways.  Very appropriate for early March.

Columbia Art League Opening

Cafe Berlin on a cold Saturday night

The band Run on Sentence played at Cafe Berlin last Saturday night, as part of Columbia's True/False Film Festival.

True False Film Festival

The opening night of Buck, at the Missouri Theatre during this weekend's True False Film Festival.  This is the festival's eighth year in Columbia...for a list of movies, see the festival's website at www.truefalse.org.

Broadway from above

Columbia's Broadway from the new parking (behemoth) structure downtown.  The view is somewhat more prosaic than the visual poetry towards which I generally gravitate.  Billiards, a tattoo parlor, and Lucy's Corner Cafe are all visible in the foreground, while the mosque, University power plant, and the hospital parking garage are visible in the background.  The wind up on level nine was so punishing that I only stayed for about ten minutes.

Oak tree in snow

A neighborhood oak tree quietly collecting snow in tonight's late February snowstorm.  This is the property of snowy adherence that I mentioned in the last post.  There was something haunting and reminiscent of Harry Callahan in this scene, I spent several minutes standing in the wet snowfall, trying to understand how to photograph it.  I don't know that I completely succeeded.

Crown Point in snow

I went out for a walk in tonight's snow, which I soon discovered had a unique character unlike any of the snows we've had so far this season.  It was a wet, sticky snow that quickly attached itself to tree branches, the sides of cars, edges and protruberances.  It didn't settle on things so much as it adhered to things.  I didn't get very far out of my neighborhood tonight, but I found this image up on Crown Point.

Broadway Diner by 67

Tony Irons photographing the Broadway Diner with a Pentax 67...during one of the warmer nights last week.  I think Tony has posted a few of his night shots at his blog, www.ironsinternational.com/blog.  As soon as Matt starts a blog, we can look at some of his night shots as well.

Short Street

Finally, a night without snow, or ice, or even a freeze.  The paving bricks on Short Street, freed from weeks of ice and snow, glistened with a dewy warmth.  This could be Columbia's shortest street, coming in at one block in length.  I've always been fascinated with the pavers on Short Street, as well as those on Waugh and on Cherry Street.  Columbia's paved streets are a difficult subject to photographically capture, but when the atmosphere is right, they seem to glow, exuding the kind of mystique and charm that only a street composed of 100 year old paving bricks can exude.

Broadway Maple Tree

An arboreal matriarch (or patriarch) of the neighborhood, this maple tree is surely as old as the stretch of Broadway on which it grows.  Just west of downtown on Broadway. 

KOPN

The red neon of the KOPN radio station on Broadway, during a January snowstorm in Columbia.

Utility Pole in blizzard

I posted a color version of this image on my Missouri-In-Color blog last week...I found the unearthly green of the streetlight a beautiful counterpoint to the pink of the night sky during the snowstorm.  I think I was "borrowing" from a photograph by Luc Delahaye...a night shot of some Russian workers waiting for a bus, softly illuminated by the tungsten blue of a streetlight on a very lonely, snowcovered road.  You can find it here http://andrewconroy.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/luc-delahaye-winterreise/winterresise_1/ or in Delahaye's book, Winterreise, documenting a trip through Russia during the winter of 2000/2001.  As T.S. Eliot said in Sacred Wood, "Immature poets imitate; Mature poets steal."

Lost car

I found this car when I was out in the blizzard last week.  It reminded me of finding a lost, half-buried member of Shackleton's crew, or some similarly lost and mysterious object.

Hitt and Locust

The intersection of Hitt and Locust streets, downtown Columbia, during one of 2011's many snows.  This is a vantage point I have used in the past, back when University Market was on the opposite corner, selling beer and overpriced groceries to people in the neighborhood.  On a snowy night, this view reminds me of something from a Maxim Gorky novel.

Booches on a cold night

Booches, on Ninth Street.

D&H Drugstore, during a blizzard

D&H Drugstore, during the blizzard that swept through Columbia last night.  Bereft of customers and any sign of a parking lot, this reminds me of a Wallace Stevens poem I once read. 

Choir Window Epiphany

I was in the alley between Columbia Photo and the church on Ninth street when I heard music.  Not from a stereo or a club, but coming from beneath the ground.  Somewhere beneath my feet a church choir was holding a Wednesday night practice.  I have walked by this window dozens of times, noting the painted music on the panes, but never making the connection.  It was something of a Dickensian moment, to hear choral singing on a January night, too see shadowy figures moving about behind the warmly lit, leaded window panes of a church basement.  All the while sliding slowly down the icy alleyway towards Eighth street.

Sake in Snow

To continue with the haiku theme introduced in the last post, or at least a clumsy attempt at it, here is Tenth Street's Sake in the snow. 

Tiger neon in the snow

The Tiger Hotel sign last week.  One of the icons of downtown.  Haiku-like when it is viewed from a distance, through some snow-covered branches. 

Wabash Station, Tenth Street