Pleasants Hardware

There are a lot of things I hate about myself, but even when my mood is suicidally low, I can always depend on one fact to prop up my self-esteem: I make things. A lot of those things are poems and essays and wordy creations of one sort or another, but a few aren’t, and I’m sharing them under a new tab, “Peel Slowly and See.” Why that title? Because I like the Velvet Underground, I guess, and because there is something optimistic about the injunction, even if, at the end of the day, it’s just Andy Warhol making a dick joke.

At any rate, here’s a photo I took in Richmond, Virginia on September 5, 2013.

I like this photo for a lot of reasons: the Wes-Andersony horizontal lines; the Stanly-Kubricky single vanishing point; the chunky, shadowed font. And, as Alexander Calder knew so well, great visual art is about balance, not symmetry, and I like the asymmetrical flourishes: the light post and it’s cut-off shadow, the smaller, purposeless bent poles, the tan structure in the back that almost shifts out of representative art to become an unprimed Lucio Fontana canvas. I don’t think I would enjoy this image if that structure were missing.

Speaking of canvas, I like the colors in this photo. The blue sky is so flat it looks like a movie set, and it highlights the real star of the show: the beige bricks. If you’re like me, you’ve been conditioned to revile beige. This is a shame. Beige is a dangerous weapon. You must handle it with care. But use it right and oh how lovely that color can be.

I used to hate that dash of yellow on the bottom right, but over the years I’ve come to love it. I’m against photoshopping normal, everyday images (we’re all little Stalins memory-holing the actual facts of our lives, aren’t we?), so I’m sure as hell against photoshopping images that purport to be fine art. (I did crop the photo slightly, but that feels different.) I’m reminded of Philip Larkin’s “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”:

But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards,
But shows a cat as disinclined, and shades
A chin as doubled when it is, what grace
Your candour thus confers upon her face!
How overwhelmingly persuades
That this is a real girl in a real place,
In every sense empirically true!

Well, this image is empirically true. That silly yellow sports car was parked on the street, so that silly yellow sports car is in my photograph.

And you don’t need to clean your computer screen: the black specks are part of the image. (Though you also probably need to clean your computer screen.) My father-in-law ran a small-town newspaper for thirty years, and I only took up photography when I inherited his very used, very dirty Nikon. I was just figuring out light meters and f-stops and all that jazz when I got my first iPhone and the knowledge returned to the void. I’m sure I don’t have to spell out the lesson about modern life in that story.

All that said, I really only love this photograph for one reason: it’s the closest I’ve ever come to creating an Edward Hopper painting.

The compositional similarities are obvious, but what matters is mood. It’s an empty, lonely, melancholy image. A strange liminal space. I’m proud of it.

That particular location of Pleasants Hardware is long gone, replaced by a Whole Foods. I don’t think that reveals anything about gentrification, though it might reveal something about time, time, time. Thirteen years ago, already. Ah well.