CONTEMPORARY EXPLORER

A small deserted building on Tryon doesn’t seem like much, until you stop for a moment. Tryon Street runs through the heart of Charlotte. Once known as the “Indian Trading Path” linking the Catawba Indian Nation to the Iroquois 800 miles to the north. Later it became a key artery of commerce known as the “Great Wagon Road.” It was named after Col. William Tryon, the Royal Governor of North Carolina in the 1700’s. Little has changed regarding the importance of the road to Charlotte, except how quickly you come upon the city core from the south. Giant buildings rapidly stepping ever south with legs of steel and glass, crushing the old along the way, or simply leaping over areas still fighting for their existence like the belt of low income housing. It is rare to find a building left behind in all this, but once in a while you come upon one such as 342 South Tryon. A small garage long closed. The owners name faded away. Still the building causes you to pause, it wears the beauty marks

  They say that when you begin to see the end of your life, you pause pulling together what you have left. Trying to hang on, to be open for renewal, to get one more chance to live vibrantly.  You can see this with malls who have seen their best years, ones on the way to being dead malls. The growing number of store fronts shuttered, halls empty. The mall tries to keep things alive, image and all.  A quiet descends on these dying malls, the chatter of roaming shoppers now stilled. The only noise the sweeping of the floors.

  Not sure you would classify all the roadways of the South as “blue highways,” but so many meet the definition of less traveled. Roads made charming by forest and beautiful farms. All the time curving their way between. They branch out from the cities to small towns and an uncountable number of even smaller places, just names on a map. Names like Anvil Rock, Red Hill, Bethune, Buffalo Lick, White Buff, Liberty Hill, and Stoneboro. Most turn out to just be wide spots in the road, but they pull at your curiosity and imagination. You only find a paragraph or two about these places and images are even harder to understand. So you get in your car and go searching. The Bible even talks about “broad places” along a path where people stopped and sought refuge from straits of various kind. After you have driven the long miles it takes to get to these wide spots, you begin to understand.  Still you always find something of interest, a picturesque building or open field, the end of a rail line,

Among the row of small retail fronts, it only seemed to distinguish itself by being closest to a major store, but seemingly unnoticed. Shoppers passed by barely giving it a glance. The only activity was the wandering back and forth of the retail clerk. A tall dark haired woman who looked like she didn’t know how she got there. They say retail is plagued by the agony of monotony. Where one moment drags into another, the only excitement when the next week's schedule appeared. The job did not stretch the brain or offer any degree of decision making. The customer was always right. You were just filling a time slot. I gazed upon it all from a comfortable seat in the middle of the mall aisle. I liked the mall most for its seats. Perhaps I kept looking at the store mostly for the oddity of its name, FIELDS. , the period puzzled me. Its meaning and origin far more interesting than the bland stock the store seemed to carry. I googled the store name and got the idea. They hinged their hopes

  I always strived to approach painting with my camera. Capturing and making a scene as artistic as possible. Wander with my camera I did to this end. Recently I read “The History of Painting and Photography” by Kila Villena in the LOMOGRAPHY  Magazine. It’s an excellent article on how photography has danced between the issues of trying to be painting like vs realistic, to even the long debated question of is it art at all? The LOMOGRAPHY movement has stretched the discussion. You can use their lo-fi cameras and special film to produce very artful results right from the camera. You start to prize the seemingly out of focus shot and light leaks running every which way. Images it takes a page of words to explain or interpret. But overtime, you can get overwhelmed. The prints falling like heavy weights on you. Suddenly, your thoughts change about photography. You find yourself longing for the purity of a photo image. One that captures the image as it is, creating an emotion or message in