I have a couple of film cameras that I use every now and again. One is a Holga 120CFN toy camera that shoots 120 format film. I’m resigned to taking film shot with that camera to a lab near where I work. It’s the only bricks-and-mortar place nearby that I know will handle my medium-format negatives. I also shoot a 35 mm SLR on occasion. I took it out last weekend and ran a couple of rolls through it, and have been looking for a local place that will process the negatives and provide me with high-resolution scans thereof. And herein lies the problem.
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A Brief History of Time
This summer, as I do every summer, I’ll head off to the U.S. with my wife on a road trip. This summer, we’ll wind up as far west as California before we turn back for home. On that trip, I’ll be carrying two camera bags containing no less than five camera bodies with lenses and associated gear. As it turns out, five is the number of cameras I remember having bought (or stolen) throughout the course of my entire life prior to walking into a store on a whim and purchasing my first dSLR.
Graffiti Alley; Ann Arbor, MI
If you’re ever in Ann Arbor for any reason, bring your camera, because you’ll definitely want to record what you see as you walk west on Liberty Street, having turned to walk away from the University of Michigan campus. Perhaps you’re headed down to Starbuck’s or Biggby for a coffee, or to Falling Water for a book. Maybe you’re on your way to Bandito’s for lunch. Just after you pass the Michigan Theatre, look to your right. There’s an alley there that runs from Liberty to Washington, and it’s used for the most part (I would imagine) by people traveling in one direction or another from the parking garage that’s located nearby. Walk down the alley, and be — depending on your perspective — entranced or assaulted by a visual cacophony of graffiti of every kind. One part of the wall has even been used as a depository for chewed gum, but gum, wall, and all have been equally hidden by the taggers’ art.
Known variously as Poet’s Alley, Tripper’s Alley, or most commonly as Graffiti Alley, it was apparently between 1999 and 2008 the site of a mural called “Infinite Possibilities,” created by an artist called Katherine Tombeau Cost. An unknown number of buckets of white paint and bottles of vodka later, large parts of the mural had been erased and over time replaced by ever-growing cumulative layers of colour, scrawls, and plenty of the kind of post-adolescent musings that you’d expect to find in a truck-stop washroom stall.
Ann Arbor cultivates a reputation as a haven for art, and it seems that at least in this hidden corner of the city, spontaneous street art is not excepted from that umbrella of tolerance.
Graffiti Alley; Ann Arbor, MI: A Flickr photoset.