(Oakland, 2008; click on image for larger version. Image copyright Hamish Reid).

For several years I commuted into San Francisco from my studio and home in East Oakland on BART; as you went over West Oakland on the elevated BART way, you could see this ramshackle old apartment building just off to the left at street level in a mostly commercial and industrial neighbourhood. Over the years it got progressively more decrepit until it looked like it must have been condemned; but these things are hard to tell from BART. I kept mentally making a note to go and photograph the place, and every now and then I'd actually ride or drive past it on my way through West Oakland, but the sun was always in the wrong place or the light was bad or (as always seems to happen in West Oakland) there'd be a huge container truck or something similar parked idling right in front of it.

Finally I went out on my bike one Sunday morning and managed to get it (more-or-less) right. I think the resulting image does a reasonable job of conveying the isolation of the building, the lack of people on the street (this isn't the sort of neighbourhood where most people take casual strolls), the bizarre angles and textures on the walls and roof; the dereliction. It's definitely one of my fave old Oakland buildings, and amazingly enough it's still there, but it won't last. It's officially condemned, it's boarded up, and it's got a furtive transient population of rats and crackheads that you sort of can't miss if you look in the right places at the right time. The neighbourhood's rough enough that it may still be there in a decade, but maybe not: the lifestyle lofters and richer artists are taking over large swathes of this place as they have a bit further down the Estuary in what's still laughably called the warehouse district. We shall see….

(Mt Shasta, Northern California, 2008. Image copyright Hamish Reid. Click image for larger version).

Right place, right time: I really wasn't looking for yet another damn Mt Shasta shot, but in a weekend of miserable weather when Shasta was usually shrouded in cloud, this was a shot that I just couldn't resist, for what I think are obvious reasons. I could see what was coming as I was driving north (away from the mountain) on Interstate 5 towards Yreka, and I guessed I had maybe ten or fifteen minutes to get it before the clouds rolled back in. I had to get off the freeway in a hurry at the next exit, double back to the south, and drive as quickly as I could along old two-lane blacktops to where I knew the shot would look great (up towards Highway 97). I didn't have a tripod with me, so I did the shot hand-held with the Nikon 70-200mm VR lens on the D2X, in slowly-fading early-evening light and ferocious winds, standing on the side of the road just out of range of the occasional passing truck. All I'll say is the vibration reduction (VR) in this lens is a miracle — this image has been printed to 17x22 inches on my Epson 4800, and it's sharp and evocative even at that size. And yes, a few minutes later the clouds came back and I didn't see the mountain again the entire weekend; a few hours later I was driving across snow-covered roads and fighting a blizzard.

You'll see this shot again in a very different context later….

(Oakland, 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid).

Fruitvale Rail Bridge from Park Street Bridge, Oakland Estuary, Summer 2007, during the fires. I can't believe I almost didn't bother taking this shot. I live and work (and have my studio) maybe half a mile from where it was taken, and I was walking across the Park Street bridge into Alameda to get some breakfast when I saw it. For several days the light had had an eerie copper tinge due to the brush fires running wild in some of the hills and mountains surrounding the Bay, and that morning everything was reduced to this beautiful near-monochrome (and everything smelled of smoke).

The Fruitvale Rail Bridge just stands there semi-abandoned, always open, but still a workaday structure next to the smaller (and very much alive) Fruitvale road bridge (like the Park Street Bridge a drawbridge). The smooth morning water really made this view work that day, allowing for the bridge reflection as well as the the overall tone. A great sight.

But, unusually for me, I didn't have my camera with me, and I decided I just couldn't be bothered to go back and get it (translation: I'm not really much of a photographer a lot of the time). I was hungry and tired. But by the time I'd walked across the Park Street bridge into Alameda, I felt really guilty about just walking on by a sight like this. So I turned around and started back across the bridge to pick up my camera. About ten metres onto the bridge I had another change of heart, thought (again) that I really just didn't want to walk back to get the camera (I just wanted a bagel and some coffee, dammit), and headed back into Alameda. You know the rest: a few seconds later, once again, I turned back, trudged home, picked up the camera, and spent an hour or so taking photos all around my neighbourhood in the strange alluring light. This was one of the best. It's entirely unmanipulated beyond flattening the contrast a little.

(Oakland, 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid).

I can't leave images alone. The original still inhabits my mental landscape, often enough while I inhabit those other landscapes around my studio, places like the old brick building on Ford Street in the image above. It's what Photoshop's for.

(California, 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid. Click on image above for larger version).

I don't usually do serious landscapes in Death Valley — I'm there a fair bit, but other photographers do a much better job than I do. And I don't really have an eye for the scenic that people like Mostly Landscape's Tony and Pam Bamford do (yes, they're friends of mine, we've done a trip or two together, and I'm always bowled over by just how damn good their prints and images are in real life). But every now and then I can't help it, and somehow I see a scene that's both scenic and has at least some of the elements of my obsessions in it.

In this case it was after a stroll up Golden Canyon, late morning, not yet particularly hot, and as always, it wasn't so much the scenery that attracted me, as the geometry and textures. For me this view would be nothing without that road cutting through it; but for most people it's that road that spoils the real-life scene.

And, as always, for me there's evocation of the heat, the dryness, and the slight breeze (and the later desert wind in the afternoon) — and the noise of the passing cars every now and then, and the sheer stillness of the approaching midday….

(Oakland, 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid; click on image above for larger version).

Sometimes the endless blue Californian skies can feel a little creepy or oppressive, and I just turn them grey in my mind, or more prosaically, with Photoshop. Dramatic, no? It's a pity it's not real (whatever that means — it's real enough to me, more real than the seamless skies of the California Dream some of the time. And that factory's real enough — another looming icon in my neighbourhood).

(Yes, only the sky was manipulated; everything else was untouched).

(Central Nevada, 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid. Click on image above for larger version).

U.S. Highway 6, Central Nevada: another of those two-lane blacktops that passes almost casually through landscape after landscape, snowy mountain ranges and passes, high desert, irrigated nooks and plains, dead two-house villages, vacant lots next to abandoned casinos…. My kind of road, I guess; I've driven it from Ely, NV, to Bishop, CA several times in the last fifteen years, always in the winter, and always in no hurry at all.

And somewhere halfway between Ely and Tonopah, there they were, in the middle of nowhere, no signs of houses or properties visible near the highway, and just the sagebrush and dirt tracks leading off across the plains towards the mountains. It was a striking image in real life; it's not quite so striking here or when printed, mostly because you really can't see that there's just nothing around these boxes, just a long straight highway and what looks like thousands of square miles of sagebrush. But even so, it's still a pretty evocative sight, and has that American Mythic West feel to it, both physically and culturally. The clouds also make this image as well, of course — it could have just been one of those gorgeously boring endless blue skies, but then there'd be no real texture there to contrast with the sagebrush and mountains, and no hint of past or future storms (and note that the sagebrush is deceptively green here due to recent rain — it's desert in reality, though, something you don't forget if you drive through here in summer).

And I can't help wondering if the next time I drive past here, there'll be a whole cluster of boxes, and it'll be obvious where the associated houses and settlements are. It might be in the middle of nowhere for someone like me, but that's no impediment for developers, is it?

(Oakland, 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid. Click on image above for larger version).

This is almost the view from my front window, a variation of a sight I see every day of my life across the road from my studio — a bunch of concrete trucks in the Redy Mix concrete plant, in front of the omnipresent ConAgra silos in (or right next to) Jingletown. This time, the concrete trucks seemed to be lurking like heavyset wild animals (hippopotamuses?) behind the wall of the Redy Mix yard, with the whole scene almost monochrome except for the tiny but very bright red light on the structure above the trucks and the subdued little splashes of colour on the trucks in the early-evening low overcast from the rainstorm moving in off the Pacific.

I like the way this image works, and not just because it's a characteristic slice of my current life and pretty typical of my neighbourhood. I think the geometry of the concrete plant, the trucks, and the silos all work together to make a nice image (the repeated cylinders, the diagonals, the rectangular windows and faces, the loping wires), and the subdued near-monochrome works to give an evocative atmosphere. But for me it's really that glimpse of the restless trucks lurking like animals in a pen that I wanted to capture: my days are full of the trucks, vans, shipping containers, barges, tugs, railway locomotives, bobcats, forklifts, roach coaches, industrial machinery, etc., that move past my studio and across the neighbourhood in steady streams at all hours. These things are the true wildlife of my neighbourhood: yes, there's a few ducks and geese in the Estuary, the usual stray cats and dogs in amongst the concrete plants, factories, and workshops (and even, once, a snake slithering across my street), and surely a bunch of rats everywhere, but the real wildlife, always scurrying or brooding or lumbering around the Jingletown, San Antonio, or Fruitvale districts is much more varied and interesting (at least to me). It's amazing how easy it is after many years of living here to be able to tell different types of trucks solely by the sound of their brakes, to be able to identify individual heavy barge types from miles up the Estuary by their wake, to see how the shipping containers are moved around constantly to graze on different lots over a month or two before being sent back to Japan or China or wherever, and to see the same familiar concrete trucks plying the same few hundred metres between the freeway and the (three) concrete plants around here every day.

So I've started to collect images like this for a putative "Jingletown Wildlife" series, not entirely facetiously — frankly, after all my years here, it's not hard to anthropomorphise (animise?) the trucks, machinery, and containers, etc., when there are more of them by far on the streets than people or pets. I'm not sure where the effort will take me (it'll probably turn out to be too twee for my own tastes), but there's no shortage of suitable images out there. We shall see….

(Note: this shot was done hand-held in rapidly fading light; I'm sort of amazed it turned out at all, let alone as sharp as it did (it prints well up to A2). Yes, there's a lot of chromatic aberration and fringing going on in the highlights, but that's a small price to pay for being able to get any shot at all).

(London, 1985. Image copyright Hamish Reid).

A long time ago when I lived in London I used to occasionally take the Metropolitan or Circle lines from Farringdon station near where I worked in Smithfield. This was the mid-1980s, and even then there were still a few bombed-out or broken buildings from World War II propped up or slowly keeling over here and there in the City and inner boroughs (in this case, Islington, but only just). The station itself was (and still is) a nice old well-preserved building, busy and workaday in that reassuring and well-architected early twentieth-century London Underground way; but right next door (to the left as you entered the station) was a classic old bomb-damaged warehouse right on Farringdon Road itself.

It looked pretty much exactly like this: broken bricks, broken beams, missing walls, arches, trees, pigeons, rats… and every time I saw it it reminded me strongly of an old castle somewhere in that imaginary British hinterland I never really visited when I lived in London, but that I'd explored a lot (and even inhabited) as a kid. I made a few half-hearted attempts to photograph it from Farringdon Road itself, but it never worked until I just stepped up one day and took it from this angle, just to the left of the station entrance. It's a shot I had to wait until the weekend to do, as it's a busy place during normal business hours, and there used to be a bunch of street stalls selling books and other stuff right where I had to stand to get this view. I got a couple of shots (with my old Pentax 35mm camera) and over the next few weeks managed to print it up. I wasn't very pleased with the results — it needed extensive dodging and burning in the darkroom, and at the time I just didn't have the resources to do that consistently. Still, I liked the image itself, and kept a test print up on my wall in Muswell Hill and later in Bounds Green.

A few years later, living in California, I printed the image up again, and this time I had the time and space to get it right in the darkroom (I was never much of a fan of the darkroom, and don't miss it at all, an admission that will probably surprise a few people out there). After a few hit-and-miss versions, I got a set that looked just gorgeous on Ilford fibre-based black-and-white paper, and I matted and framed a few of the prints. I took one into work with me and hung it on my office wall, and apart from my looking at it every few days, I basically forgot about it again. One day a colleague wandered in and noticed the print; after spending some time looking at it, he asked what it was, and without really thinking, I said "Farringdon Castle".

He — like pretty much everyone I've used that name with — didn't doubt that it was a castle of some sort, so the name's stuck. I've printed up a few more in the digital age, and now it's even easier to get it to look the way I wanted. No, I'll say it again, I don't look back fondly to the days of chemicals, film, and endless hours in the darkroom….

(Oakland, 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid. Click on image above for larger version).

The tangle of masts and wires and cranes that is my extended back yard…. My studio's right next to the Oakland Estuary in Northern California's San Francisco Bay Area, and the place always fascinates me; I walk or ride my bicycle around the place (and neighbouring Jingletown and Alameda) with my camera, looking for shots like this. I knew what I wanted, and I got it: a long lens (Nikon's excellent 70-200mm VR on my handheld D2x), an image busy with shape and activity (in the larger version you might be able to see the figures working on the old tug in the foreground), the colours of sunset, the icons of my neighbourhood (the salvage cranes and dredges moored next to the Dutra yard, the Coast Guard cutters in the background, the running waters of the Estuary, the masts of some of the yachts moored in the marinas, the long bulky shapes of the ocean-going scows, the semi-derelict tug being worked on…. It's a part of the Bay Area that few people notice, let alone see, but it's where I live.

As usual, some of the things I simply didn't notice at the time are probably crucial to the way this image works: the colour of the tug's funnel mirroring and emphasising the colour of the sky, the slight lean of the tug towards the left complementing the masts and crane leaning the other way, the organic textures and reaches of the rushes to the left complementing the steel and straight lines of the rest of the image… but otherwise, for once, it's pretty much what I saw, and what I wanted others to see.

Incidentally, the old green and yellow(ish) tug in the foreground, the "Respect", keeled over and capsized in the channel while being moved, a month or two after this picture was taken (no one was killed or injured, apparently), leaving behind a couple of lighted obstruction buoys and the problem of how to salvage an already once-salvaged vessel. It's still underwater, just to the right of the image, months later as this is being written….

(This image has, not surprisingly, become the splash image for my Around Jingletown site and its associated Around Jingletown photoblog).

(Trona, CA, 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid. Click on image above for larger version).

It used to be that sometimes when the wind was blowing the right way you could smell Trona from miles up the Trona Wildrose Road, long before you could see the town itself (this was certainly true the first time I drove into Trona a decade or two ago). I don't know if it's still true (the last time I was there I had a cold), but it's a distinctive sulphur smell that seeps into everything from the processing plants and dry lake beds.

So Trona's a tough place, a busy little Mojave desert mining and industrial town, nestled up against and between beautiful rugged bare ranges, surrounded by salt flats, the Trona Pinnacles, scrub, sand, and … junk. Driving in through the outskirts of town I'm always mesmerised by the casual junk strewn around front yards, side streets, vacant lots, and the tough bare mountains standing behind the industrial plants.

I pass through Trona maybe once a year, but I've always found it difficult to capture the way I see this place, the disjunction between the beautiful surroundings and the industrial plants, the way everything seems to glint in this landscape, the junk, the hills, the dirt, the truck windshields, the smokestacks, the roofs, the cables… and sometimes everything seems to be held together by those cables, strung between poles, across sandy lots and bare streets, between old wooden sheds and windowless buildings. I think the real problem for me has always been that the place is about atmosphere (in every sense), and that's a difficult thing to get with a short visit here and there and a few snaps left right and centre; it's also about visual juxtapositions that don't work without physical context.

This image does things differently, takes a different tack, and, while it's actually missing some of the most crucial image elements I associate with Trona — the plants, the railway, the windowless churches, the high school (home of the Trona Tornadoes) — it sort of gives the right impression in ways most of my other attempts don't. Why does it work for me? Because it leaves all that other stuff out, I suspect, and because if you spend long enough in Trona, the wires seem to be everywhere. The rest is there (for me) by implication, but for someone who's never seen (or even heard of) Trona, the image probably leaves you wondering whether there's anything else there at Trona at all — and maybe to want to find out yourself. Which would be a good outcome for any photo….

(Oakland, 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid).

Yes, you've seen bits of this before. I've often strived for the flesh-meets-steel effect, the collision of the intimate and the estranged, often a little too hard, a little too obviously, but this one works for me. It's definitely got a sci-fi feeling to it for most people, which isn't what I wanted at all, but never mind: the contrasting structures of body and port, the nipple showing through defiantly, the reddish tone, the intimation of skin and surface… that all sets it in the right direction for me. I'll get it right one day…

(Oakland, 2006. Image copyright Hamish Reid).

A recasting of an old fave, this time in monochrome, and this time a little less freighted with emotional overtones. But there's still the contrasts between the surfaces, and the inevitable narratives you're almost invited to make up if you see this without the twin contexts of my studio and my life.

And even if you don't know the back story or the bodies themselves, it still works just as well as pure texture and abstract geometry, a landscape of asymmetries and surface.

(Hungerford Bridge, London, 1986. Image copyright Hamish Reid. Click on image above for larger version).

I'm not much good at the social realism / street photography thing, mostly because I don't feel comfortable aestheticising other people's suffering (in other words, I'm no Diane Arbus or Weegee, and I don't think I've ever wanted to be). But I'd seen these two guys around a lot on Hungerford Bridge over the previous year or so, begging from the tourists and the theatre-goers crossing the river. The guy on the right ("Jimmy") had been chatting with me for a few minutes this particular day about Ireland and Australia and how he'd ended up begging (a long story I've told elsewhere) when he saw my camera (which is usually well-hidden; I'm not one of those people who stroll about with camera gear hanging off them or stuffed into camera bags, etc.). He made me take this picture of them so that "the workers in Australia know what Thatcherism is really like". I'm always nervous about taking photos like this, but I did it anyway; so far this is the only real example I have. I never saw "Jimmy" again; the man on the left (a homeless deaf mute) was still around the following year, but I lost track of him after that. That "CND" (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) sign is an absolute classic of its time, too, a then-ubiquitous sign of a London that took the Cold War and its own nuclear obliteration very seriously indeed, in ways that seem a little difficult to believe nowadays.

Note the typical midsummer London light — flat, grey, shadowless, with a steel-grey sky hanging over everything (this was taken late afternoon sometime in August or September). That light dogged me all my days in London…. And note the grain: this was taken with Tri-X (ISO 400) in my old Pentax 35mm hand-held, and push-processed to ISO 1600 due to that terrible light making a couple of earlier handheld shots on this roll difficult without a lot of pushing.

(U.S. Highway 50, Nevada, April 2007. Image copyright Hamish Reid. Click on image above for larger version).

U.S. 50 through Nevada, the self-proclaimed "Loneliest Road In America", one of the great American high desert drives. You drive for miles along a flat straight stretch of two-lane blacktop across the desert floor, surrounded by sagebrush and playas, not another vehicle in sight, heading straight towards a sheer 10,000' snow-clad range, wondering how the hell you're going to get through it; the road bends or curves a little, you rise up to six or seven thousand feet as the road twists through the snow and the rocks, and suddenly you're heading downhill again to the next long straight stretch….

Yes, it's yet another desert two-lane blacktop image, but I couldn't resist. It probably wouldn't have worked without the cloud cover and the subdued light that tends to result from that. The first time I drove through here, sometime in the early 1990's, it had the same cloud cover, but there was also a foot of snow over everything, a novel sight for someone so used to the hot high deserts of California. This time there was just snow on the hills and ranges, until a little further down US 50, where it snowed heavily on me from this side of Austin all the way to Ely.

This image was taken from approximately the centre of the Google Maps snippet below, between Fallon and Austin (Google maps — and the topos they're from originally — seems to like putting names like "Middlegate" or "Frenchman" on their maps in remote places like this, but it's not as though there's much of a settlement there in most of these places, let alone a town or village). If you zoom in a few clicks you'll see a long straight track heading south from US 50; this is the Fairview Peak Earthquake Faults "road" whose signpost is a few hundred metres to the left of the highway above, just down the hill from where I was taking the photo. Some fifteen years ago on a bitterly cold still November morning I went down that side road in a 4WD on top of about six inches of fresh trackless snow, with that same low glowering grey sky above me, not always quite sure where the track was, and after what seemed like a long trip further and further into nothingness, just as the track turned and opened up onto another long shallow valley that stretched into the central Nevada greyness, I lost my nerve. I stopped for a while, had a bite to eat, listened to the silence, wandered about the snow a bit, then turned around and headed for the relatively-crowded safety of Highway 50.

Rugged country, for sure.


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