Strange
Day

So one of my dream locations to photograph would be the shipbreaking beaches in India or Pakistan. When oceanliners, tankers, and cargo ships get too old to operate any more, they beach them in these places, and workers chop them to bits.

This isn’t clean, or safe, or tidy. These are people with no safety gear, in one of the most polluted places on earth, doing dangerous work. It’s the tail end of the commercial world. It’s the stuff every cyberpunk story is built upon.

Speaking of which, I missed a dream shot on Friday, in a decidedly less hostile environment. On the way home from seeing a movie — fittingly Bill Cunningham New York — I saw it. It must have been about 11:30 at night, when we walked past the H&M store in downtown DC. The business core of DC tends to turn into a ghost town around 6pm. So by that time of night — on a Friday no less — it should have been empty. But in the store, right near the doors, was a lone worker. She was sitting on the floor next to a white platform, and a little zone of light in an otherwise dark salesfloor. She was pulling white fluffy … things… out of a box. She’d puff them up, and place them on the platform. It was surreal and monotonous at the same time. And the sparse color palette and dramatic range of light made it all the more interesting to me.

Of course, for like the first time in forever, I had left the house without a camera. Poo.