2012-06-10

Staso / Grey

I like this brick. How could I not? It's named after my favourite colour.

I took two different photos of it – involving fifteen or twenty attempts – and the other one is a little more whimsical. I took them at the end of yet another trip to the Leslie Street Spit, and I was hoping that this one would finally do what I wanted.

After looking through my photos of the bricks on white, I knew that I needed one outlier to show the environment that they were from. Those contextless Lakefill photos needed something to tie them back to the place, to explain how they could be so different and why those differences were important. I had made three previous trips to the Spit to find that kind of an image and none of them worked. By the time I made this fourth trip I was seriously considering finding someone in the nearby marinas who could take me out to photograph this shoreline from the water.

I don't really think that idea would have worked, either.

This photo – see it bigger – sums it up perfectly for me. It's a brick with words, including the name of my favourite colour, and it's exactly what I would have included in the project if I had found it last summer. It was lying less than fifty meters from where I took the Lakefill photos, and the photo shows one of the two beaches that I pulled material from. The pretty one, naturally, without all of the ugly rebar tangled around, but that's not dishonest. I took my fifteen or twenty photos, put away the camera, and headed home.

I never did bother asking about chartering a boat – but I did go back one more time.

No comments:

I have broken the links to hundreds and hundreds of photos, which will take a long time to repair. The workaround is to replace "photo.matthewpiers" in the link URL with "matthewpiers.smugmug". Awkward, but only temporary.

This is happening because I have revamped matthewpiers dot com. More of what I write and photograph will be going there, so check it out as well.

Older Photos by Month