Photo: Two Minutes Away

March 22, 2010

The Daily Shoot assignment for March 17: Grab your camera and walk 2 minutes in any direction. Stop. Find a photo worth making from where you stopped and post it.

This was challenging. The place I ended up two minutes into my morning foot commute to work that day was wretched: the low brick wall near an abandoned, grimy building owned by the city. An area rife with graffiti and trash, but without any of the strange intrigue that such areas sometimes have. Just ugly.

I tried photographing it to capture the bleakness. But it just looked like a sad dirty wall and some sad dirty sidewalk. I tried looking up, but just got, yawn, some bare tree branches and telephone wires. Again, yawn.

It wasn’t until I kneeled next to the wall, crawled in close, and really looked that I saw that there were small plant-lings growing here. Unfurling. Happily being plants. And I was satisfied.

I think that this is a great exercise. The timed, pseudo-random photographing. Dadaism would be proud.