At the Parking Lot on Center Street

As many of you no doubt also have, I’ve had difficulty getting back on my feet and putting things back together, as we partly and uncertainly emerge from our confinement.

But now I’ve posted a new – well, almost completely new – portfolio on my photography website, called “At the Parking Lot on Center Street.” 

https://www.lawrenceruss.com/index/C0000a1BSpjBKmws/G0000paZOhkxkN8g/I0000vg7Ma1lSgww

Its previous incarnation, “A Brief Walk on Center Street,” has been largely replaced, and what hasn’t been replaced has been re-edited.  When I took the original photos, mostly impromptu, I didn’t have with me the gear that I really needed for the “job.”  From time to time in my pandemic confinement, I thought about getting back and doing the work better.  And the confinement gave me the opportunity and the obsessive push (how many photography videos did I watch, sometimes more than once!) to explore new gear, new techniques, new software, all of which played roles in producing this portfolio.  (Thank goodness for 20-frames-per-second focus bracketing.)

To emphasize certain aspects of the portfolio, I narrowed its scope even further, to photographs of things either on the parking lot (bordering railroad tracks on the west and kitty corner from a church on the southeast) or on or across Center Street.  Most of the growths that I photographed just grew up wild.

You’ll be able to tell the four flowers or groups of flowers that were cultivated.  And I questioned myself about including those, because they’re more conventional than what or how I usually photograph and consider fit for sharing with the public.  But I wanted the tone, the spirit of this portfolio, to be quiet, modest, and those flowers were a part of the little scene.  And conventional beauty is, after all, beauty, even though we may need to see it in a new context in order to really appreciate it again.  I’ll offer a little more about those flowers at the end of this post.

As I found out after I’d made the photos, the parking lot is actually owned (and the few cultivated flowers are provided) by Trinity Episcopal Church across the corner from the lot (though it rents out most of the space for commuter rail parking).  That’s the Church building in the four-frame sequence that ends the portfolio.

I don’t want to say too much about all this, but I think that this old poem of mine (“Light Rain, September”) shares some of the spirit of this portfolio:

LIGHT RAIN, SEPTEMBER

She stops and listens

through the screen

to a sparse rain

falling

in late night silence.

*

Small drops, in porchlight,

plip

a single leaf here, a cluster there

in cool and toneless

tree percussion.

*

The rain makes delicate

sounds

on the grass, on the wooden

sill, dropping

as gently and freely

*

as a widowed moon’s affections.

To the woman

hushed at the window,

it seems

that something of the earth

*

still speaks to us.

Perhaps you won’t see it this way, but to me, this portfolio and this poem are political in the deepest sense.  In connection with this, and with those flowers that I said I’d come back to, let me read you a poem, “Five Men,” by the late, great Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert.

(Text at:

https://poems.com/poem/five-men/