Thursday, January 11, 2024

Guardrail in the shadows

Straight lines
London, ON
January 2024
This photo originally shared on Instagram

I keep coming back to the mundane.

And in the pantheon of photographic interest, a guardrail bathed in sodium vapor light behind a big box store certainly qualifies as mundane.

It’s 13 minutes after sunset when I take this, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way because the sky has been uniformly grey for days.

I could probably wait for conditions to improve, but I decide not to. I’m here, now, and the steady stream of cars taking the shortcut behind the store encourages the weird little voice in my head that tells me to take the shot.

Scenes like this never seem to merit mainstream attention. Hundreds of people probably pass this point over the course of a given day, and I’m reasonably certain nobody is giving the guardrail much thought. Or any.

But as I walk the path between the perfectly straight lines of a forgettable-commercial-architecture structure on one side and a riotously overgrown woodlot on the other, it occurs to me that entire slivers of our built environment are likely never recorded. At least not deliberately.

And it isn’t as if I should make it my mission to photographically document every square inch of this often dreary-looking city. But I can at least find ways to capture the occasional spot that seems to speak to me.

And this one does. I think it’s the lines. I have a thing for clean lines. Weird light cast across indifferently constructed textures? Even better. Monochrome? Of course!

There are no rules in any of this. Just a little voice that talks to me whenever it sees something it likes. If only the rest of our existence could be so simple.

#ldnont #london #ontario #canada #building #architecture #architecturephotography #buildingporn #architectureporn #urban #city #hydepark #canadiantire #retail #streetphotography #monochrome #geometry #photography #Nikon #nikonphotography #nikon_photography #photooftheday #instagood #nofilter #nofilterneeded

Related:
Stairway to not-heaven, February 2023
I'll be out back, June 2021

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