The Next Page: Seeing Pittsburgh 'From My Car'
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The Cathedral of Learning from Oakland traffic at dusk. At red lights, on Forbes Avenue before the Carnegie Mellon campus.
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I'm a commuter. Most mornings, my drive from North Huntingdon to my job as a television director in the Strip District takes about an hour and 10 minutes. I don't mind the drive. In fact, I kind of like it. However, I'm going to confess that I'm a commuter with a healthy but somewhat odd obsession that I put to work during my commutes: Taking pictures.
A few years ago, I picked up the digital still camera that I tossed onto the passenger seat after scouting a shoot location. While sitting in traffic at a red light on Liberty Avenue headed away from town, I aimed the lens into my side mirror and snapped the shutter a few times.
It was days later when I downloaded the photos and saw an image of the city I had never seen before in print or on television. There on my computer screen was the shiny metallic side of my car framed neatly against a blue sky and our city's skyline. I was inspired. Today, I'm still taking pictures from my car.
PDFs of images"From My Car"In his book "Pittsburgh: A New Portrait," Franklin Toker writes that "cities are simultaneously visual environments, physical entities and mental constructs, and so are the neighborhoods within them." From my car, I can see exactly what he's talking about. Our rivers, historic buildings, bridges and colorful neighborhoods offer us scenes that truly move us. If we pay attention to those environments, entities and constructs (things) that Dr. Toker inspires us to consider, we see a rich mosaic of people, architecture and our history -- images that show the story of our city.
I'm certainly not alone in my obsession with photographing Pittsburgh. The real pros like Clyde Hare and Teenie Harris paved the way for many of us to establish Pittsburgh as more than just a livable city. It is one of our nation's most photogenic cities as well. PG photographers shoot the city every day. Their work is model photojournalism in the real world of assignments and deadlines. The hook with my images is simply that they are captured from a perspective you don't often see -- from the road.
First Published April 11, 2010 12:00 am
