Industrial Roads

In contrast to yesterday’s post, today I snapped a shot of the docks off of East Bay Street in Charleston, SC. I have driven past these docks plenty of times before, and I always wanted to stop and take a shot of them. Today, I decided to practice what I preach and pulled the car over. I walked up and down the street looking for a good shot. I was intentionally trying to frame it to show only a man-made landscape. When the worker walked through the frame, It morphed the whole idea into something new for me.

Look at the grandeur of what we as humans can do. Items such as the shipping containers which see much more of this world geographically than most of the people who create them. Their bold colors, stark texture, and patternless arrangement like giant building blocks line the coast with giant cranes replacing Palmetto trees and a magnificent suspension bridge carving out the skyline like a pair of mountain peaks. In the foreground, instead of grass, lay the train tracks that will eventually cart those boxes to the mainland. Walking through it all is a man. Man, who created this landscape, is strolling through his domain. It’s as if the creator of the world was caught walking through a valley and someone snapped a photo of it.

Every element in your work matters. To me, what started out as a shot to simply show an artificial landscape turned into a nearly spiritual representation of creativity with the addition of one small but meaningful element. It’s the little details that can define a bigger picture.