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.