Train Station

This is a shot from "Septa track 3" at Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. The monotony of the tracks was ironically the beauty. You can see that the same Ad is posted on every track, next to the same benches and poles. In theory it should be a very dreary place but the lighting and architecture give it somewhat of a majestic presence instead. The repetitiveness of the the same shadows, ads, even the bleached out buildings in the background is amazing. I like how the picture makes you wonder about what's behind the photographer, or maybe, how long can this process go on for?
The light really made this picture. It was early afternoon and the sun was out. The shadows, the brightness and the background buildings are all accentuated in this picture because of the daylight. This same picture would be entirely different at night or say even dusk. Not necessarily bad, but different.


This next picture is of the roof. At first I didn't really like this picture because I didn't feel like it really captured the atmosphere, but it's grown on me. The monotony is evident again, and again somewhat majestic. Looking at the picture now, it seems like sitting in an overturned ship with the sky as the water, like a glass bottomed submarine. Something I really like about this picture that you can't see from the first one is the humanization. This picture shows the people in the station but is too unfocused to personalize it. I think that adds a touch of something for the viewer that gives it a different feel. While the first might seem more abstract, this one maybe transports the viewer to a majestic and impersonal train station.

The fact that no train is pictured in either photo is key as well. I think that a train station is so universally pictured that everyone basically knows what they are looking at without being told. Its a sense of subtleness that adds to the picture as well.



This last picture is the last of this set, but is in a totally different vein. More of a symbolic type then a vision/imaginary one. The billboard advertises "America's Next Top Model", a bad network's symbolization of the American Dream and Western Societies indulgence in utter shallowness. Sort of a poorman's MTV.
I enjoy the irony of the billboard set up against a backdrop of an industrial field with a smoke tower, electrical towers, and train tracks, the nitty and gritty of societies necessities. The working man who put that up had to be smiling at the bigger than life sized "anorexia-worked-for-me" cellophane spokesmodels and thinking, "Oh, if you could only see yourself now".
Running the "broken record" risk, I have to say that the lighting changes this picture as well. You'll notice the shadow across the bottom half of the picture, which covers the billboard and the sun shining on the smoke stack and electrical towers. It accentuates the tower and minimizes the billboard, drawing the eye to focus on the stack more than it already would. In terms of pictorial real estate I think the mainstay of the picture is the tower while the billboard and the women are only secondary, which again draws the eye to the stack first, adding more irony to the picture. Somewhere the working-man-god is smiling.