Innsbruck, Austria Street Art - Part 1 of 3

During my recent trip to Austria, collecting footage for my forthcoming Salzburg Global Seminar video project, I took a side-visit to Innsbruck. I had no specific agenda for that stop; I just thought it'd be nice to spend a couple days on my own, seeing someplace new. One surprising highlight: the amount of street-art sprayed upon public (and private) spaces. While recent media attention has understandably focused on the upheavals in Greece, it's clear that a sizable contingent of Austrian youth feel disenfranchised and angry; you merely need to read the signs they plaster, stencil, and paint. Of course I found a similar concentration of street art in Vienna during my visit last year, so I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised. Austria is feeling the same pressure that's sweeping through the world. Here's a sample, with more to come:

Anti-fascist Action

"Double-cross the slumlords"

Mordechai Vanunu: a technician who revealed secrets
about Israel's nuclear weapons program

[2 of 3]

Overpass Mecca Part 3

Jenny and I took advantage of the warming springtime weather by returning to San José for another adventure in nighttime long-exposure photography. This time we set our sights on a highway interchange on the southwest of the downtown core, amazed at how many more vantage points and complex composition opportunities this one has over our previous experiments [check out my new overpasses label].


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We started near the Guadalupe River Park, which frankly depressed me with its murky and unlit pathways. My thoughts drifted to memories of San Antonio's River Walk, and I wondered if San José would ever mount such an impressive display or urban planning. Here, the only pedestrians we saw seemed to be pushing carts with all their earthly belongings. Locking the car on a lonely road far from the towering hotels and friendly restaurants downtown, we bypassed fences and hugged the inside of busy on-ramps, heading for a spot that felt right. As the sun began to dip beneath the mountains, we dropped our gear at last.

We'd arrived with enough light to allow for some individual exploration, so Jenny and I split off to wander the cavernous space in search of shooting positions. Not being intended for pedestrian use, this site is prickly with overgrown brambles. Thus we were sometimes forced to barrel across damp islands of vegetation, shouting across to each other as the cars rumbled a few feet above us so loudly that we could not communicate otherwise. Every few minutes, planes would roar overhead too, sounding only slightly more fierce than the cars.

The columns reminded me of grand Roman spaces, the horizontal and diagonal lights forming ethereal lines and arcs like some sort of superimposed geometry. A cathedral of movement, a San José's overpass seen from underside is pretty distant from the city that I know. It's a strange thing to remember that I drive over this place almost every working day, which is the coolest aspect of urban exploration: seeing the everyday in a new way.

I've decided that I particularly love the thrill of setting up a camera alongside a busy highway, feeling the wind of cars racing by. We take reasonable precautions to allow for some space between ourselves and the vehicles. And we never use a flash, for fear of startling drivers. Indeed, I believe that our choice of protected position renders us invisible to anyone but the most eagle-eyed motorists. And by the time we check our long-exposure shots, the cars are nothing more than brilliant lights, receding.

Not everything worked smoothly, of course. We managed to time our shots to capture the glowing trails of jets landing at the nearby airport, but we couldn't quite align our schedules with the lightrail trains that poked along less regularly. And then there was our own departure. We arrived with sufficient light to make our way without much hassle. By the time we'd wrapped up the shoot, though, we'd gotten thoroughly disoriented. With our flashlights illuminating thin corridors, we stumbled our way between the crackling hillsides and pulsing culverts until we finally saw a train track leading to surface streets. Exiting from our nighttime adventure, it seemed strange to walk someplace so normal.

(Photographs by Andrew and Jenny Wood)

Overpass Mecca Part 2

Last night we returned to San José's Overpass Mecca, a glorious snarl of concrete ramps and streaming car lights that offers stunning photography opportunities. Once more we set up our D5000 to capture long exposure images, this time feeling a bit more confident in our process. Even so, the night was cold and we shivered with each set-up. Jenny'd take about ten minutes to compose her shots and try a few experiments while I'd scout the next location. During my turn, she'd search for her next inspiration (and update her Facebook pals!). Like that, we leapfrogged from site to site.

When doing night photography, I feel less guilty about employing photographic tricks to capture a sense of what I see. After all, the image in the camera viewfinder is almost invisible. The long exposures necessary to capture any kind of light already represent a sort of cheating. Then there's the choice of white balance, a tough issue when working under the city's yellow lamps, since different settings produce entirely different results. Finally, is the necessity of post-processing when the in-camera image is transformed to be viewable on a computer. More art that journalism, night photography is about capturing feeling rather than reality.

Taking these sorts of shots is not without some degree of risk. Remember, we're stumbling about a dimly lit crosshatch of road arteries that are not designed for pedestrian use. Abandoned junk and detritus, along with patches of dense, spiky vegetation, require careful footwork. Add a few wandering street-folk, and we pay close attention to our surroundings and our exit strategies. Then sometimes we'll spot a swell vantage point that requires us to hike along a high-speed roadway, the cars whizzing with only a concrete strip between us. When we get the shot, it's worth all the hassle.

I love the feeling of hoisting our reassuringly heavy tripod over my shoulders as Jenny and I search for new positions to set up our shots. Sometimes we'll spot a perspective and march towards it with confidence. Other time we'll wander aimlessly, searching for the right feeling. It's all for the production of dreamy, ephemeral images, but we also gain a genuine feeling of work and accomplishment as we climb up grassy hills and slide down rocky embankments. Jenny and I are continuing our tradition of urban exploration with theses photo shoots, and I can't wait to see what turns up next.



(Photographs by Andrew and Jenny Wood)

Overpass Mecca Part 1

Despite hectic schedules and lousy weather, Jenny and I have been looking for opportunities to return to our light painting experiments, and finally we found time to get back on the road this past weekend. Better still, we focused on one of Jenny's photographic goals, taking pictures of overpasses. The results suggest a terrific site for future shoots.

Jenny often says how much she loves things that tower over her. That's one reason she digs our trips to Monument Valley; she's inspired by soaring expressions of natural or human power. So she recommended that we turn our camera toward San José for a reasonably close urban approximation of that feeling. For me it was an obvious choice. I too am drawn to highway overpasses as sweeping icons of omnitopia. Thus we began our trip with a sense of optimism.

Conducting no research on an ideal shooting site (a common lament for us) we nonetheless agreed that we required a place where we could safely park with plenty of compositional opportunities. In short, a cluster of overpasses twisting around each other. Beyond that, we were unsure of our specific itinerary as we cruised over the hill. Luck for us, our first stop far surpassed our ambitions: an intersection of Highway 85 and 87 that even has a no-fee lightrail station parking lot.



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For about four hours we took turns and practiced techniques, struggling (as ever) with long distance/low-light focus issues and the need to establish a proper white balance in a zone flooded with ugly yellow sodium lights. The results reminded me of mid-century futurism: a world of blurred cars amid urban canyons.

I can't wait to get back to that retro tomorrow.

Update: Overpass Mecca Part 2

(Photographs by Andrew and Jenny Wood)

Placeless Enclaves

These days, it's hard to visualize a world without mobile communication. Where I work, San José State University, I notice everyday how countless students pour out of their classrooms with mobile phones glued to their ears. When I wait to take my bus home, I see person after person walking along the sidewalk, looking straight ahead while chatting into their hands. And I can hardly imagine the Highway 17 bus ride without hearing at least one passenger engrossing us with his timely communiqués. With our mobile phones, the notion of being "here" seems less meaningful than it once was, or so I suspect. Writing this now, flying across an overpass while onboard the bus, I try to remember a time when making a phone call required an attachment to place.

Think back to the age when telephone booths seemed as ubiquitous as Starbucks coffee shops. You may flash upon that 1967 movie The President's Analyst when James Coburn was captured by spies after entering a phone booth, or you may remember further back to that crazy fad in which college kids would try to pack as many of their buddies into one of those tiny rooms as drunkenly possible. We recognize the oddity of such an era when we think about the so-called "loneliest phone booth," located on Highway 50 in Nevada, a testimony to the ways in which mundane technologies become exotic with the passing of time. In those seemingly ancient days, you could not carry your network world with you. You needed to enter a physical enclave, a place set apart, the phone booth. This was an important place.

Today, in contrast, we carry placeless enclaves, our mobile phones, melding them upon our bodies in almost borg-like fashion. Frequently I'll spot a Bluetooth device hugging the ear of a person who drifts like vapor from place to place, lost in the reverie of some distant dialogue. The creepiest part of the scene is that occasional blue-white flash of the device, blinking with no apparent purpose except to signal to others, "now this is a talker." More frequently I notice folks bolting mobile phones to their pants or coats, demonstrating a perpetual preparation for important calls. And though I want to ask these people, "do you really want to be so obviously tethered to these devices?" I hush my queries. Surely some people need such connectivity, just as I need to mind my own business. And that's entirely the point.

Still, I can almost remember earlier days when we somehow managed to pass through our lives without this kind of connectivity. I look through old college yearbooks that are filled with an endless array of dances, teas, picnics, games, formals, and other forms of place-based interaction. I cannot imagine the students of that age descending the stairs from their classrooms only to open a phone. Surely, even without mobile phones, it must have been loud, a buzzing cacophony of greeting, argument, announcement, and farewell. Today's mobile conversations are loud, no doubt, but they are generally enclosed, a moving cone of personal space that just happens to overlap with hundreds of nearby enclaves. Such is the nature of public life in so many places today.

More and more people talk, alone.

(Photo by Andrew Wood)