Legacy

Yesterday. Yesterday I was inspired.

Of all the places to walk and be, it was "Hometown Girl" in Hampden that set my fire. I was browsing for a gift in that chintzy, tourist-trap of a store in one of the quirkiest neighborhoods in the city and I was knocked off my feet.

A Aubrey Bodine. Of course I've heard of him, although for the life of me I can't remember how my familiarity with the name got started. I've seen his works before (I'm sure....) but I never noticed it before, if you know what I mean.

I saw, in the back corner between the snappy BlueQ lotions and the always-dark soda fountain cafe, a stack of matted black and white photos that caught my eye. The one in the front was interesting and appealing in that abstract cityscape kind of way, so I picked it up. I have been through enough art shops to know that local artists usually sell their works like this, and the photos are usually mediocre. I expected more of the same, except I was almost ready to see if this person had a website.

It was a simple photograph, but with wonderful range of tones all in grayscale. The outline of the classic Baltimore rowhomes' white marble steps led the eye through a maze of order and chaos, squares, rectangles and right angles. Their Qbert-ishness led the eye right out of the frame, right to where tiny dark figures walked down the sidewalk in the corner.

It is a sight that no local of Baltimore could miss. It is a scene so commonplace we don't even think about it anymore. Most of the time one sees such a sight, the air is filled with humid, choking heat, the growl of the MTA bus and usually the neck-prickling fear of getting shot in the back by a drug deal gone bad. The only thing that struck me about this photo was how clean it looked, how unchipped the stones appeared.

The date on the back of the card said 1945.

Looking up, I caught the tip of a Gothic church spire poking above several other thick white mats. I reached over and pulled it out. Stunning. The sequence of a lunar eclipse over the imposing silhouetted shape of the Washington Monument and the Methodist Church. Far, seemingly miles below the heavenly show were the foggy white trees and the sleeping boxy rowhomes. I didn't know what to think. I have scorned living and photographing this place for years, and here was this man, a photographer active long before I was born was beating me to the creative punch even after his death.


Although I never do this, I bought two notecards of his work.

The first was the lunar eclipse - it made me miss living in the city, the tantalizing twinkle of streetlights always just outside my window, the whoosh! of cars that was never too noisy and sometimes completely silent. My favorite memories of school were sitting in the windowsill of our 6th-story dorm room at 2 AM, gazing out towards the red Domino sugar sign and wishing it was tomorrow. My love of urban nightscapes was borne from this era: always night, always orange, always cool. No matter how hot and sticky the days are, the nights are a blissful relief. Night is when you venture down into the lights and savor the laughter of friendship, smoke and mirrors until the sun pushes you home again. I wonder now how much I was missing in the celestial lights above, how many wonderful nocturnal vistas I could have captured if I had shifted my perspective just 50 feet higher.

The second was a street scene that could have been any residential neighborhood in Baltimore. A woman, her dress firmly anchoring her to any of the former two centuries smiling at the Arabber in the cart up the street. The houses have not changed one whit; the people both have and have not. You will never see women like her anymore, but the Arabbers have undergone a transformation. While they men in the cart bear a strict resemblance to their earlier counterparts, the horses are smaller, the carts are bigger... and there are far, far fewer of them. A very obscure, dying practice only unique now to Baltimore. Even here, many have no idea this trade exists, or has existed, but with the changing of society and the economy the need for street vendors (and the desire to purchase fresh produce) has vanished.

Although I am not technically a native to this city, it is difficult to see these things change so drastically in so little time and to not feel sad.

I want to get out there.
I want to shoot.
I will not be here forever.

You sure as hell never appreciate anything so much as when it is nearly gone, and I have only Bodine's ghost to thank for making me realize just how much there is in this city that I have spent so many of my years.

A Tempestuous Fever

Yesterday, as I was wrapping up and uploading my photo of the day, I happened to glance out the back window. What I saw there made me grab my camera and sprint outside.

Once in a rare while you see something great, something so moving and powerful that you can barely pick yourself up off the floor to appreciate the moment for what it is. This was one of those evenings. A spectacular sunset so filled with explosive color, clouds, light and motion that you cannot dream it in sleep. From our limited perspective down here on Earth we can only watch nature do her thing, swirling the clouds, roiling and boiling above us while the sun gently sinks below the horizon to touch their underbellies with light. Pink and cerulean, purple and red and yellow all together and at war in the heavenly sky. Unreal beyond belief, I am suddenly aware of how small we are.

A random and almost misplaced sprinkle of spring rain cooled my sunburned shoulders. I don't know from which cloud it came, but the gentle, soft tapping on my skin was like a faint echo of quiet laughter.

Lost at Sea, Adrift

In the darkest of nights, I dream that I have no place to call home.

In the darkest of days, I do not even have to be asleep to awaken gasping and grabbing for this information that so many people take for granted.


In this way, imprisonment would be the greatest punishment I could ever experience. My family's background and tendencies did not, of course, lead me to be familiar with the ways of the convict or social deviants that consider prison to be free room and board. Jail was something that happened to other people, those scum of society who you don't nod to in the street. You just don't mix with them. Whether or not this is a reasonable method of dealing with the judicial system is not what I am going to argue now.


I've visited prisons before: prisons, juvies, correctional facilities, whatever flavor and whatever you care to call it. The holy mecca of jails, of course, is Alcatraz. No other prison is so romantic and so rich with stories, histories and reputation. It is a good day when you have the opportunity to fly across the country, meet up with four other accomplished photographers and sail out there to shoot it. Alcatraz has a huge draw, partially because of the history and unique physical location and partially because it is as close to an abandonment that the general public will ever see.


In truth, as an abandonment it is a bit of a disappointment. As a museum it is pretty cool. The 300 other tourists, the guided tour and the ($22 for a 5x7) snapshots of you in front of the Rock were more than a little hokey. What was much more interesting was the setting sun on the stones, the cries of the seagulls and the stern, private talking-to we got from a park ranger as soon as we stepped off the dock. We would be escorted off the island immediately, they said, if they saw us lagging behind the rest of the crowd. As photographers you have to grow thick skin about such bigotry because you do walk around with a target on your forehead, but for the life of me I could never quite envision the looming, raging threat coming from a few nerdy white guys and two Asian chicks.


Inside and outside, the smell is the same: the mildew and concrete and the cold. That never changes, no matter how clean park rangers scrub the floors of dust and footprints. The chipping plaster and bird guano was lovely, although screaming children detracted quite a ways from the silence I usually enjoy while viewing such sights. It was difficult to focus, difficult to remember that we were not only working against the clock but also the crowd, the birds, the officials dressed in olive drab glaring at us from down the hill and under their brims.


I used to wonder what it was like to sit in these cells and gaze out into the world just beyond reach. Now I think less of that and I wonder about the more mundane issues of the prisoned. Do they have family? What happened to their possessions? Do they have a home to return to? The last point in particular. The human psyche is adaptable and able, surely, to adjust itself to recognize the concrete cell as "home" for the duration of their stay. But what of afterwards? I am soft, weak, and vulnerable. To know that there is no one, stable, solid place to lay my head at night is the most terrifying idea in the world. No place to relax, stop looking over your shoulder, where things stay where you put them and you can retreat when everything else is too overbearing.

In all likelihood I will never have the experience to answer these questions.

With nightfall, life continued as it was on the outside: the sunlight fading from the cooling blue sky and the rising wind of a cold Californian night.

Alcatraz, the Rock