Its nothing new, and quite obvious, but in every city across the nation, there are the back alleys and side streets that most people don’t see – or rarely ever see the light of day. Maybe they just don’t choose to see them, even?
All these scenes here are within blocks of each other, pretty much within the same square mile in the middle of Searcy, Arkansas, the town in which I live while attending college.
You see these scenes now… in the coming days there will be a Part 2. With every great ugly, also comes great beauty. And to not show the beauty of a small mid-western town would be a travesty… not to mention unfair… and journalistically dishonest.
Photos like this are calculated. I don’t know if it is evident, but in every frame, the image and the way it was presented was deliberate.
Its not unusual to stand in one place waiting for 10 minutes for conditions to be just right.
But on second thought, sometimes its the great ugly that has some sort of strange inherent beauty.
Its nothing new to take photos of the derelict parts of a town, but there’s something oddly attractive about the peculiar desolation of photos like this.
Its just part of the way I work with instant film, but I take the photo and put it in my pocket and don’t look at it until I get back home. I don’t sit there and brood and wait for the image to appear. It is just part of the process for me.
A lot like developing film is like opening a present on Christmas morning, I take images on instant film and deny myself the instant gratification. I guess you could call it part of the artistic process, but I would never consider myself an art-donkey of sorts.
Well, that was enough “artsy-ness” to do me for a few months. Gotta get back to journalism. I have another client interview coming up tomorrow, we’ll see how that goes. 🙂
For that, stay tuned…
-Noah D.
