After The Rain
I used to think I was being pranked when I would walk out of my studio in East Oakland and see things like this. One of my friends lived in the same building and knew I took photos of stuff like this, and he had the right sort of sense of humour to do it. But no, as far as I could tell, this was the real thing, just sitting there on the side of the very busy industrial street I lived on as I wandered off to get my morning coffee after some rain. Plus it’s the sort of thing you would see in that neighbourhood, the weird mixture of industry, commerce, craft, crime, poverty, and art we call Jingletown.
So I just grabbed my iPhone and took a couple of photos of it there and then, then went off for my coffee at Kefa Coffee. I forgot about the images for a few weeks, then rediscovered them and thought, hmmm, not bad (and no one had owned up to pranking me with it yet), so I instagrammed this one with no filters or anything (yes, it’s just another Instagram…). And this is the result.
Obviously the subject matter really makes this work on its own (the incongruity, the splotched dirt and textures, the shapes, and, above all, the colours), and the combination of subdued light and shiny surfaces helps, but, as always, for me there’s the extra sensory sparks: the incessant traffic noise I hear whenever I see an image of that part of Jingletown (there’s a very busy four-lane road with trucks passing maybe six feet behind me as I’m taking this photo; the noise is like a constant haze that hangs over the area); the wastelands of junk and garbage and graffiti and broken glass we had to negotiate to get to or from the building (and past this particular scene) or, in fact, to get anywhere in that immediate neighbourhood; and the relentlessly broken infrastructure of the surrounding neighbourhood (and city, and, for that matter, country).
Just another evocative memento of my life in Jingletown, I guess.
