Remains, of a day
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Given my current limitations, it’s not surprising that this week at Newtown Pentacle ends as several others have recently, with an ‘odds and ends’ post as I’ve used up most of the images needed for narrative.
Looking ‘Under the hood,’ as it were, one of the many things I’m doing while walking along with the camera is thinking about how to string the photos I’m gathering up narratively. ‘Establishing shot,’ zoomed in subject, background, etc. I’ve got a whole shot list rotating in my head the entire way, and when I see something interesting that might support a post of its own, I gather a few detailed shots of whatever’s caught my attention.
Due to aforementioned limitations, the broken ankle and recovery thereof, I keep on finding myself running a bit short – at the moment – on fresh photos. Hence these odds and ends posts which utilize shots that didn’t quite fit into or tell the stories I wanted to tell.
I like the shot above, of CSX #3473, for a variety of reasons, but it doesn’t ‘tell a story’ given that its background is so generic.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I learned this talking about Newtown Creek for all those years. If a shot of the creek was facing westwards you’d see some facet of Manhattan’s skyline and it would instantly ‘place’ the waterway’s location and thereby tell a story. I’ve shot photos of that concrete factory above, but from onboard the Birmingham Bridge with the Downtown Pittsburgh office towers visible in the background.
Admittedly, Pittsburgh has nothing as iconic or familiar as an Empire State Building on which to hang its hat, but the concrete factory doesn’t seem to float in an unidentifiable void as it does in the shot above. Saying that, I did like the shot enough to upload it to Flickr, but it didn’t necessarily tell a story.
One of the things I’ve put a lot of thought into during this interval of uselessness is how to describe what it is I actually do. It boils down, your humble narrator has decided, to storytelling. Back when I did comics, or worked on Madison Avenue, or conducted tours of New York Harbor and Newtown Creek, even what I’m still doing here, is storytelling.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s one of the anchor piers for the South 10th street bridge over the Monongahela River, sitting alongside Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Heritage Trail, at an entrance to the City’s Color Park in a late afternoon. That’s ‘where,’ ‘what,’ and ‘when’ for you, but with no ‘why’ or ‘how’ which I’d direct you to prior posts this week if you’re curious about. If I threw in the fact that my ankle hurt, there’d be some conflict and urgency mixed into the story. The best and most efficient story ever written, in terms of narrative structure, is the children’s tale ‘Mary had a little lamb.’ It’s got it all, including conflict and pathos.
Back next week with something different, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
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