Playing the angles in a downtown intersection

Up close architecture
London, ON
April 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

Do you play anymore?

It’s a serious question. When we were kids, we played all the time. By ourselves or with friends, at home or out and about, in schoolyards, in the back seat of the car on the way to grandma’s, everywhere.

Then somewhere along the way, we forgot about play. We grew up. Got serious. Felt the weight of responsibility. Play, and that childlike sense of focus, quietly disappeared from our lives. Most of us don’t even remember when that particular light went dark.

This photo, taken on a lunchtime walk earlier this week, speaks of play to me. The brilliant sun made shooting something of a challenge, but I couldn’t resist the pull of this lovely old building at the corner of Dundas and Clarence, in the middle of London’s bustling, scarred, defiant downtown core.

I felt like I was playing. With light. With angles. With a spot on the sidewalk usually occupied by bus commuters, homeless people, screaming street preachers, and drug addicts. But in the midday sun, no one bothered me as I sized up the geometry of the building and tried to shoot into the sky without going blind in the process.

It felt...childlike. Like when you’d build a Lego tower and not know how it would end up. Would it collapse? Would you have all the right pieces? Would the outcome even matter? Short answers: Yes, because gravity always wins, no, because I was always a messy kid, and emphatically no, because the journey was always the thing.

Which is what it felt like here: A moment in an improvised adult playground where the outcome mattered far less than the fact that I was bothering to do this at all. Maybe on my next walk I won't be alone. Maybe play need not be something we leave behind as we exit childhood.

#ldnont #london #ontario #canada #road #random #urban #street #photography #building #architecture #architecturephotography #design #buildingporn #architectureporn #blue #sky #brick #concrete #lines #sun #google #pixel2 #teampixel #photooftheday #instagood #lifeinthemargins #family #everything