cut your teeth

Went for a walk in New West when last ‘down south’. Mixture of industry and commercial, a drive by place to get to the bridges, to switch gears from highways to city streets, to climb hills. The Sally Anne alone is worth the trip.  A place to cut your teeth.  I don’t even know what that means, really.  Maybe they should put that on a sign as you drive in.

If you’re a photographer you’ll be drawn there.  Body shops with bent windows, riverside train yard, old steely lines out to pasture,  steep avenue diagonals, and there two kids are tossing a frisbee across a weedy field.  Pale high rises rise, grudging gentrification.  Modern contraptions woosh by but somewhere someone is banging something with a hammer.  You could be in a novel by Cormac McCarthy, a new-old-west.  It’s all out-of-sync, it’s ad-hoc and unplanned but it has its own ecology.

These were all taken with an old, cranky and spring-driven camera named Gursky, chewing through expired tungsten film.  He doesn’t see to well and he has a tendency to exaggerate.  He gets confused.  Or maybe it’s you – sometimes you forgetowindthecamera.  Some doubletakes, but here, that’s good, that’s all right.  Too many rules in the city these days, says Gursky.