PROOF: Pedestrian Photographs (S. Grand Ave., St. Louis, MO) 2009

Though many of you have seen these already, I am adding them here for posterity or whatever.

For these my friend, Julie Malone, let me borrow her camera which, this time, is a, like, a real camera! It's a digital SLR and it's either a Pentax or a Nikon... Pentax, I think, and it's all heavy and with many options and you have to hold it up to your eye to shoot... I prefer the little point-and-shoot thingies for this type of work, I think. But I am, of course, grateful to get my hands on any camera I can! Thank you, Julie!

This bunch if images is me walking from, oh, roughly Grand and Bates all the way up to Grand and Arsenal, and keeping on the East side of the street.

________________________________________________

Julie and I were going through the raw images together here on the computer and she mentioned that I might like to separate this shot from the others. "That would sell like crazy!" she said, or something to that effect.

She's probably right, too. I should print and frame a buncha these and hit the art fair circuit!

Let's face it. It's pretty. People like pretty.

Don't ask me why, but most of the houses in St. Louis seem to be built on little hills. I don't really get it. I imagine it has something to do with the stupid weather we have here but, as a result, pretty much every house has a little set or two of concrete steps leading up to the door.

The first leg of my little neighborhood odyssey took me through a mostly residential area and I decided to shoot all the little step-sets, which was a lot. I think I got fifty or sixty images, each of a different set of steps. here are eighteen of those.

Going through the raw images at home, neither Julie nor I were were particularly thrilled with these shots. They are, after all, just pictures of grass. Well, they're pictures of the long grass which is a decorative element edging the parking lot of the mini-mall with the Quizno's, I think. Yawn, right?

Well I messed with them a little and now I really like it. With two of the frames flipped, it's got kind of a grassy vortex thing happening and, let's be frank - everybody loves a grassy vortex!

Surface frags. I got tons, but who cares. Here're sixteen from the many I shot on this walk.

About midway through my walk that day, there was this, what looks like a big disused grocery store, with giant empty parking lots in front. So I shot 'em, thinking they might work as a set. They do, too, i think. Stacked up like that, they seem to sort of float a little bit or something. I don't know.

Then a little further on, there were some adjacent lots in front of another - what looked like an abandoned building - but these had numbers on all the spaces. So I started in with a new routine of going from space to space and shooting each number. They went up to about 60 or 70, so I was getting ready to settle into this location for a while when, from behind the abandoned building comes some security guard dude yelling, "You gotta go, man! You can't be here!"

I'm, by now, pretty used to this sorta thing happening, so I didn't offer much of any resistance. i think I said, "But I'm just taking pictures of the numbers..."

"I don't care, man, you need to leave the premises immediately!"

Sort of a shame in that I would love to, right now, be showing you a sequence of parking lot numbers that goes up to sixty. On the other hand, I'm not totally sad about having been spared the tedium of taking 60+ photos of parking spaces...

I ended up getting up to about 27 when the guy came out, but these are just the first nine, of course.

I have to say, though, that it's got me wondering now... Why the hard-ass security on an empty building? I think maybe the government has some sort of a Black Ops project going on in there or something.

My verboten parking lots likewise had some poles sticking up out of 'em in, presumably, the spots where cars are not supposed to go. here are the tops of four of those.

These will be of especial interest to Ms. Katherine Rhodes Fields as these are the... man, I don't even know what you call these... like, pylons, or...? Okay, Katherine, you remember the Dollar general just down the street from your house and how they had those big orange concrete cylinders in front there at the parking lot?

These are those... well, twelve of them.

I'm sorry to have to say that on the day that I walked by, the store was not just closed, but all fucked up with a busted window and... it wasn't looking good.

I won't lie... the hood's not looking great.

Here are the four corners of this big, I don't know, like, this concrete access plate embedded in the side walk right in front of the Northwest corner of Tower Grove Park. It's pretty big, more than would fit in the camera's frame, so I just shot the round corners, as you see, and put them back together.

Blank sign I want so much to do stuff to, but won't, 'cause, as you know, I am both lazy and civil. A combination which, I should add, hallmarks St. Louis livin'.

Oh, man, though...

Right around Grand and, I think, Connecticut, there is the gas station where everybody goes to get their cigs. But not until the day I walked by with Julie's camera did I notice just how many circle shapes there are embedded into the concrete and asphault near there! Or sprayed on... I don't know. I think it's cool, so I've collected them here for you.

This is some pretty funky-ass lenswork going on here, huh? This is about as weird as I'm wanna get with these I think. It may even be too much, too compromised. I don't know.

This bit of sidewalk is located just outside the Kinko's, I think, or thereabouts.

As on just about any main street in America, there's a lot of commercial activity happening. With that, of course, comes a lot of commercial (and municipal) language and visual chatter. Here are nine instances of that shot in the 'Surface Frag' style.