Barbed Wire, Shadow, Highlights: Vancouver, BC

This decaying alley was a rich environment for a privileged person to explore all that has been forgotten, discarded, misplaced, and abandoned.  I felt like my eyes could travel for days amongst the garbage, the aging brick, the smashed glass and barbed wire placed on the walls to keep out thieves.  Every brick was rotten, every wire rusty; the alley was a mirage of regret and disentanglement from reality.

I imagined what it would be to make this place my home, like many people in the neighborhood do.  The feeling would be quite different: as the months and years wore on, one would feel too much like the rusty wire, the old bricks, the garbage.  The people here can be no freer and no richer than the ones who ignore them.

This photograph came about mostly conceptually, as I worked at piecing together the shadow of a rusty piece of wire and some highlighted, rain-streaked concrete.  I like the composition better inverted: the shadow forms a disconcerting peak, imposing and impossible; the rotten brick wall seems to hover over an abstract promise of a sky.

Barbed Wire, Shadow, Highlights: Vancouver, BC, 2007