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Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Rogue Photo 2: Alleys

Rogue Photo is a sort of notional imprint that I am starting to organize projects under. Pictures and text together, intended to be made into a cheap mass-produced book. Content over finesse. This is the second such project, and it aims to be more detailed, less political than US, the first one. This project is about alleys, alleys in Bellingham where I live, and in particular the alley behind my house. This is a rough draft of some introductory material.

Bellingham, old Bellingham, by which I mean the Bellingham that is about 100 years old, is a town of alleys. This is not all of Bellingham, there is much that is newer, more modern, with back yards and back lots directly against other back yards and lots. Modern Bellingham has the same curved street suburbs, the co-called coved design which allows more houses with less street, the very opposite of the alley based designs of a century past.

But downtown, and in the neighborhoods near it where I live in one of those throwbacks, every block in sliced down the middle by a narrow, little used roadway littered with whatever bits and pieces concerning the uses it was then and is now put. Gas meters, dumpsters, electrical connections, cooking oil disposal, recycling bins, storm water drains, cable television boxes, telephone connection boxes, access doors for people, access doors for trucks, access doors for cars, parked shopping carts laden with the belongings of the unfortunate, with bollards and concrete aprons and iron grates higgledy piggledy as necessity has dictated over the last century.

There are alleys downtown, with commercial dumpsters and the remains of streetcar tracks, with large-sized gas meters and massive interconnects for anything that needs a massive interconnect. Further out, there are the little alleys behind the 100 year old homes on the tiny lots. Alleys that sometimes provide access to the one car garage, or for household garbage, recycling, and compost pickup. Alleys that provide a little cover for the unfortunate among us to move less visibly about the neighborhood, as well as providing a foraging ground for those who gather cans to recycle for cash to ease whatever pains they have.

In some neighborhoods the alley is little more than a walkway and bike path, all essential services being streetside, to the front of the house. In others, where the alleys were laid out a trifle wider, the lots a little larger, the buildings set back a little farther, garbage pickup happens on the rear of the house and the Garwood compactor trucks thread their way through the maze of haphazardly parked cars and haphazardly set out bins, early in morning, as an occasional householder charges out in a bathrobe just ahead, or sometimes just behind, the truck to roll the bins out hastily, hopefully, to schlep the recycling crates to the appropriate edge for pickup.

In winter the alleys are dark and wet, in summer they are hot and arid. Always, they are a little tucked away, a little hidden. Only the people who live on the alley, really, use the alley, except for the occasional trash-picker, dog-walker, shortcut-seeker. Neighbors meet and chat for a few moments, one parking a car the other tossing a bag of trash into the bin, both with a little free time. More often in the short summer of endless sun, less in the wet winter with her brief, damp, overcast days and endless chilly, wetter, nights.






12 comments:

  1. I'll reserve judgment about the text, but I do like the five photos you've posted.

    Have you photographed any of these scenes (or those from other alleys) at night?

    I ask, because in my experience, that's when the magic really starts to happen! ;^)

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    1. I have done a little at night, yep! It's a bit tricky, as you may know! There's a lot of darkness, and then a few very bright light sources, and often the light sources go on any off. On the other hand, doing these sorts of photos is trivial.

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  2. I like both your text and the melancholy of your alleyway photos. A good match.

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  3. The prince of "alley photography" is Michael Wolf and his Hong Kong work -- highly recommended.

    To the impartial observer, what you're *really* photographing here is overhead wires and utility poles. A bit more attention to those would add to the interest of these photos, compositionally, quite a lot.

    Mike

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    1. Bellingham runs, as far as I can tell, exactly nothing electrical or fiber-optic underground, outside of the downtown core. The sky around my house is a dizzying web.

      Unfortunately, MY phone/cable/internet/electricty is all street-side. My own alley has exactly no overhead wires. Since the intent here is to push in closer, and do a detailed study of my own alley, the overhead wires are going to drop out rather than take center stage.

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    2. On Mike C's suggestion I looked at Michael Wolf's "Architecture of Density." Good photos but the subject matter is freaking depressing; inhuman, unsustainable.

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  4. The photos above are actually drawn from a lapsed typology project. One could, without a doubt, produce several hundred such photos in Bellingham and assemble a book and it would certainly have some interest. It's the opposite of what I am interested in, though.

    Fundamentally, it would involve shooting without much seeing. These alleys are incredibly detailed.

    My goal is to drill in closer, and genuinely see my own alley.

    My inspiration is George Perec's "At Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris", although I don't intend that as a model.

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  5. alleys are inherently fabulous.

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  6. Text is really good, cropping is your friend.

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  7. A friend of mine is planning to photograph every street in the Netherlands named after the composer Alphons Diepenbrock. He will be kept busy. Will he discover something that links them all, other than their name and the fact that they are streets?

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    1. Based on my experience, he may learn that typologies bore the shit out of him ;)

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  8. Interesting project and good photos. I would never have thought of photographing alleys, but in your photos the alleys seem to show the character of this particular place.

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