Stone House (with Sofa), Harvard, CA, 2010
All the pixels, move-in ready, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/4611078542
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@mattblaze
I notice something unusual about this photo, compared to the majority of them at least. I wonder if you know what I'm noticing?
@negative12dollarbill The light is very hard and directional, perhaps that's what you're noticing? I normally prefer less starkly extreme light.
@mattblaze It's that you took it at an angle. Normally your viewpoint on photos of buildings is strictly perpendicular.
@negative12dollarbill Ah, I see what you mean. I think I thought of this as a photo of a place rather than a building.
@mattblaze
Move-in ready. 😏
Seriously, though...great shot! Thx for sharing.
You monster! I'm colorblind and my mother had a couch once! How dare you post this without a content warning!
(Sorry, sorry, trying to lighten the mood with a bad joke, please don't block me.)
These kinds of scenes always make me wonder about the story behind them. Someone built that home with hope in their heart, and then it was abandoned and likely vandalized. But is the hope still there?
@Perrin42 It's a sturdy looking house, still standing even after what looks like fire damage. You don't build something like that without a fair bit of optimism.
Captured with a DSLR and a 24mm shifting lens, shifted vertically to preserve geometry.
The tiny ghost town of Harvard is one of a series of sometimes extravagantly named, but now largely abandoned, communities near the Union Pacific Railroad and former Route 66 in the Mojave. Most of these tiny towns became forgotten victims of an upgraded Interstate highway system that passed them by.
I think the couch may still be there, if you need one for cheap.
@mattblaze ssssssh you may attract a vice presidential motorcade with that talk
The natural landscape of the American west has stunning and unique beauty almost everywhere you look, but when I'm out there I usually find my camera drawn more to the built world we attempt to superimpose on it.
@mattblaze my experience has been that the landscape of the West is just too expansive to photograph, and even if you get around the scale, no camera I’ve seen can really capture the subtleties that draw the eye. I think the only way to really experience these landscapes without seeing them yourselves is through paintings that add the subjective experience that transforms what is essentially just rock and sand into the subtle yet still overwhelming beauty a camera just misses.
Adding in a human element, even something as banal as a fast food restaurant, can help create the contrast that exposes the scale and beauty of the place in a medium that otherwise struggles with it.
@josh0 Ansel did it pretty well, as have a few others.
I’m personally more interested in the question of how we interact with the landscape than in the landscape itself. But I’m a weirdo.
I think it was in making this photo that I understood better Picasso's famous comment that art is "a lie that tells the truth". I don't actually know the story of this little house, but in photographing it, I tell a version of it that is both literal and fanciful.
@mattblaze I thought that was Susan Sontag on camp? Maybe she stole it.
#SpeculativeFiction is this so often!
Ask Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemison, & @scalzi
@mattblaze That describes every photo. Zoom in on something, you can make a few people look like a crowd or a crowded place look deserted.
@mattblaze Your in-depth analysis of the imaging technology used to capture your very quality images being immediately followed by an iPhone snapshot of a cats belly is a source of endless amusement to me.
@Sempf The right tools for the right jobs.
