entropy
Finding beauty in the mundane. When I am able to achieve this in a photograph, I am satisfied. On this particular day I had traveled to Benton Harbor, Michigan in search of photographs for my Entropy project. Benton Harbor is Detroit on a smaller scale. Like it's sister city on the other side of the state, Benton Harbor suffered the malaise of residents with the means moving from the city, a reduced tax base upon which to provide public services, the elimination of good paying industrial jobs, poverty, deteriorating housing stock, civil unrest, and arson of abandoned buildings.
I wandered down a side street and found this wall of a building that had once housed a lumber yard. The low winter sun cast harsh shadows from the vines and door frame onto the stucco wall, enhancing the contrast between dark and light. I was presented with several potentially-interesting compositions, so I made photographs of each, thinking that I would choose the best one during the printing stage in my darkroom.
After developing the film and making contact prints to study, the idea of a triptych came to me. So I printed three of them in the lith-style that I had adopted for this project, and arranged them in what felt like a complementary way, presenting them all in a single frame.