![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Feb. 8th, 2006 08:47 pmI suppose it's about damn time I made a "photography" icon. Was going to do w00t-Henry with a camera, decided I did not have the energy to draw a camera, and so frisked Google Image Search for Fatal Frame caps with camera in.
Anyway.
My very very favorite subject: icky buildings, preferably abandoned or at least heavily neglected, particularly commercial properties, schools, churches, and hospitals.
There is this strip mall I must have ridden past a bazillion times on one of my varied routes home from work. The side that faces the street is fairly well-maintained (read: BO-ring).
Today, just for the hell of it, I thought I'd cruise around and look at the back, because buildings are usually a lot more interesting on the side that doesn't have to be kept clean and presentable.
So I pedaled around past the end where the Chuck E. Cheese has been like forever, got off the bike and pushed it around the back hoping there wouldn't be a fence or anything blocking off the back of the strip mall and OH HOLY MOTHER OF CRAP HOW IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY HAVE I OVERLOOKED THIS GOLDMINE OF URBAN DECAY FOR SO LONG!?
Stretched out before me, as far as the eye could see: grubby concrete walls slathered with graffiti. Boarded or barred or welded-shut doors, most covered with rust, mold, cracked paint, and/or more graffiti. Rusty drip marks stretching from roof to asphalt. Glass block windows with some of the blocks partially broken. Strange electrical doodads, and twists of concertina wire to keep people from fucking with them. And CHOIRS OF ANGELS SINGING THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS ABOVE MY VERY HEAD AS I LAID EYES UPON THIS GLORIOUS MESS. You see a building that needs sandblasted and painted by someone other than a bunch of kids with Krylon, I see the fucking Louvre.
Down the alley I went, snapping pictures left and right, oohing and aahing at the particularly icky bits of rust and green growth and chuckling at some of the graffiti. There was one where a little cartoony guy's head lay on one side of a door and his feet lay on the other, at ground level--I'm guessing the rest of him had been spraypainted on some predecessor to the existing door. There were also the hallmarks of twelve-year-olds with spraypaint--a few "FUCK YOU"s and a "SUCK MY DICK" in what looked like the same shade of off-white. Towards the end of my run, there were some classic lowrider caricatures in aqua and white.
And then just as I got to the end of the narrow bit and near the corner of the strip mall where the back side opened up into a sort of clearing and things started getting really neat...
...the "hay guy my batteries are low" icon started flashing. Oh, that's right, the batteries they pack with the camera have a lifespan of approximately five minutes.
"FUCK," I said, grabbed two last shots (the aforementioned lowriders and a nice rusty valve), and came home to feed the camera a pair of Energizers.
I picked out one nice icky door to crop and upload to sxc.hu a little while ago and will go through the rest later. I'm going to have to do a lot of cropping and resizing before these pictures will be fit for teh intarwebs, because the new camera's output is not only excellent, it is fucking huge. 2272x1704 at 180 dpi. \m/
Anyway.
My very very favorite subject: icky buildings, preferably abandoned or at least heavily neglected, particularly commercial properties, schools, churches, and hospitals.
There is this strip mall I must have ridden past a bazillion times on one of my varied routes home from work. The side that faces the street is fairly well-maintained (read: BO-ring).
Today, just for the hell of it, I thought I'd cruise around and look at the back, because buildings are usually a lot more interesting on the side that doesn't have to be kept clean and presentable.
So I pedaled around past the end where the Chuck E. Cheese has been like forever, got off the bike and pushed it around the back hoping there wouldn't be a fence or anything blocking off the back of the strip mall and OH HOLY MOTHER OF CRAP HOW IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY HAVE I OVERLOOKED THIS GOLDMINE OF URBAN DECAY FOR SO LONG!?
Stretched out before me, as far as the eye could see: grubby concrete walls slathered with graffiti. Boarded or barred or welded-shut doors, most covered with rust, mold, cracked paint, and/or more graffiti. Rusty drip marks stretching from roof to asphalt. Glass block windows with some of the blocks partially broken. Strange electrical doodads, and twists of concertina wire to keep people from fucking with them. And CHOIRS OF ANGELS SINGING THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS ABOVE MY VERY HEAD AS I LAID EYES UPON THIS GLORIOUS MESS. You see a building that needs sandblasted and painted by someone other than a bunch of kids with Krylon, I see the fucking Louvre.
Down the alley I went, snapping pictures left and right, oohing and aahing at the particularly icky bits of rust and green growth and chuckling at some of the graffiti. There was one where a little cartoony guy's head lay on one side of a door and his feet lay on the other, at ground level--I'm guessing the rest of him had been spraypainted on some predecessor to the existing door. There were also the hallmarks of twelve-year-olds with spraypaint--a few "FUCK YOU"s and a "SUCK MY DICK" in what looked like the same shade of off-white. Towards the end of my run, there were some classic lowrider caricatures in aqua and white.
And then just as I got to the end of the narrow bit and near the corner of the strip mall where the back side opened up into a sort of clearing and things started getting really neat...
...the "hay guy my batteries are low" icon started flashing. Oh, that's right, the batteries they pack with the camera have a lifespan of approximately five minutes.
"FUCK," I said, grabbed two last shots (the aforementioned lowriders and a nice rusty valve), and came home to feed the camera a pair of Energizers.
I picked out one nice icky door to crop and upload to sxc.hu a little while ago and will go through the rest later. I'm going to have to do a lot of cropping and resizing before these pictures will be fit for teh intarwebs, because the new camera's output is not only excellent, it is fucking huge. 2272x1704 at 180 dpi. \m/
