[Doc Diaries] The Truth and Beauty of Diversity

I mentioned last time that Singapore's "gleaming architecture, wondrous glass-covered skyscrapers, and spotless streets" felt as if they were devoid of humanity. When I got to downtown Melbourne, I again found myself surrounded by towers of metal and glass. But… this time it was different. This time, I could admire the dazzling architecture without feeling like I was losing my grip on reality. I could look up, but still feel my feet on the ground.

I'm still not entirely sure why, but I think it has a lot to do with space, and I think it has a lot to do with utility. Let me try to explain what I saw, and what I felt.

A bunch of the architecture in Singapore was exquisitely designed, but it felt so special as to seem otherworldly. Out-of-place. It felt like a mystical wonderland that you would visit, but that didn't seem to have as much connection with where and how people actually lived. You would look around, and you would see works of art that placed form before function, even though they did still function.

When I looked towards the sky in the Melbourne central business district (CBD; basically, "downtown"), the trappings of everyday life remained in view. And they fit into the place. The angles of the street lamp fixtures matched the angular design of the buildings. The towering heights of the skyscrapers were echoed in the way that the netting of a play area also reached towards the sky. It felt like design was… an everyday thing. Like the difference between a beautiful sculpture and a nicely sculpted fork. They might both be works of art, but you observe one from afar, and you use the other one every single day.

[Doc Diaries] Place and Time

It's one thing to say it. That infrastructure is a product of its place and its time. But it's something else to travel somewhere new, and to see combinations that you haven't seen before. To see familiar pieces of infrastructure that are accomplished in completely unfamiliar ways, or just as interesting, to see modes of infrastructure that don't feel familiar at all.

A few months ago, I took a trip to Singapore, and so much of what I noticed were the things overhead and under foot. The ones that are built once, and then gradually fade into the unremarkable march of everyday life.

Doc Diaries: Experiments in Motion

One of my main photographic goals is to tell the story of the motion that happens in the world. I often use a number of common techniques (such as panning), and those typically get me to a pretty reasonable result.

But sometimes, I want to shoot for unreasonable. Sometimes I want to try something that seems almost impossible, just to see if it could work out. Sometimes I want to see not just what motion does look like, but what motion could look like.

The opening image was the result of one such rumination. "How do you take a picture that focuses on the sense of drawing a bow across the strings?" I love what I came up with, but it turns out that the key wasn't to plan, or do lots of math, or to have any kind of a controlled setup. The key was to notice my friend playing her cello, and to just give it a shot. I tried to get the focus where it needed to be, the camera handled the exposure, and I hit the shutter when I felt like the moment was right.

I think one point here is that some experiments are really simple, if you're the right person to run that particular experiment. It often pays to just give something a shot without overcomplicating things.

Detour

"We don't usually stop here, but…" That's always an ominous thing to hear while on a train ride. As one of the conductors made some non-committal statements about how something had just happened, and that we'd be stopped at Burlingame for a short while, some of the passengers had already assumed the worst — they started gathering their belongings, contacting ride sharing services, and generally trying to find other ways to continue traveling up the peninsula.

They were right. A few moments later, the speakers crackled to life. For some of us, the words "trespasser incident," said what the other passengers had already presumed. A few moments later, the wording became clearer. "Fatality." "Looks like it'll be more than a little while." Many of the remaining passengers disembarked at that point.

The conductors were already outside, standing at the north end of the train, chatting with the engineer. I asked one conductor and she replied that both northbound and southbound trains were stopped, at which point my traveling companion and I decided to scrub our trip to San Francisco and go for a walk.

When we returned, our train was gone. That, combined with the quiet around the station, was eery. The trackside monitors stubbornly and steadfastly displayed the current time in a shade of yellow that nearly matched the streetlamps. It's always comforting to see them flick over to the expected arrival times, but those were clearly on hiatus. Lacking any other kinds of guidance, we sat next to the southbound tracks and waited.

After a short while, a southbound train approached, #284. We rose to meet it as it came to a stop, but a rush of passengers emerged from the doors as they opened. They said that everyone was getting off and that we should all head to the opposite platform and wait. It turned out that this train (on the far side, in the photo) was the one that had struck the person, and it was finally letting passengers off before it would continue south, out of service.

Another train arrived before we were able to cross, but it was headed northbound (the near side train, in the photo, #289). As we waited, I talked with a few of the passengers and learned that the on-duty crew is relieved immediately. In subsequent research, I ran across this article from wnyc.org, in which a Caltrain engineer described it as being "rescued from the scene."

The #289 departed, and then so did the #284. Then a second northbound train came and went before a southbound train finally arrived to effect our own somewhat less traumatic rescue. But the emotions surrounding these incidents are always peculiar and relatively incoherent. I imagine that this is an evening that I'll be pondering for awhile, yet.

Contact: Quiet Moments of Kinship

I love it when people touch each other. As a documentary photographer, I strive to notice the moments that seem to matter most — the ones that illustrate the personalities, emotions, and relationships of the subjects — and I try to capture those moments. More often than not, moments like that will involve some aspect of physical contact.

So this past Sunday, I walked around the Mountain View Farmers' Market with a friend and just took pictures. My goal was simple: 20 years from now, what images would the people I photograph care about the most? My task was to capture those images.

Riding the tracks with Dangerous BoB Widin

This is Conductor Dangerous BoB, and he's quite the character. I first took actual notice of him as I was sitting in the bike car and I overheard him telling stories about the history of the train industry in the Bay Area, at which point I moved closer to get a better listen.

As with anyone who's been in a given field for awhile, BoB has lots of stories, and he'll share them in rapid-fire fashion if he's got an audience. In the span of a few Caltrain stops, we heard a breadth of knowledge spanning from how in the height of the industry, some trains used to go through 10 switches apiece; to what a terrifying experience it is to be hooked up to two Caltrain engines at 100mph; all the way to how much of a pain it can be to deal with the W32.Blaster computer worm.

I made a point to give him my card (and he gave me his) before getting off the train, which is when he mentioned that he had also spent some time in the film industry, and that his nickname "Dangerous BoB" came from Stephen Spielberg himself. From his IMDB page, he's listed as an assistant property manager for the original Back to the Future, as well as Parts II and III. It's always fun to meet interesting people.