"Remains of the Martian Complex" (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/11/09)

As I may have mentioned elsewhere in this bliggity, I am primarily a people photographer. Never got the Ansel Adams bug to go outdoors and photograph Mother Nature in all her wide-angle splendor. Or slap on the macro lens and get up-close-and-waaaay-too-personal with assorted flora and fauna. Nope, as a rule my subject of choice is the human biped, optimally female, and ideally cute and a bit naughty. But that's not to say I don't have my "exceptions to the rule" moments.

This is one of them.

Driving down Route 1&9 through Linden, NJ in March of '08, I came upon a factory complex that was in the process of being torn down. The scene you see here pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks; it looked as if Godzilla had reached down with one claw and swiped a chunk out of the corner of the building.

And, as (bad) luck would have it, I didn't have my camera along with me. So a week later, en route to photograph another indy wrestling show in lower Joisey, I made a point of detouring through Linden just to take some shots of the building, which luckily hadn't been demolished any further.

The original shot was taken on a sunny, blue-sky day, and while compelling enough in its native state, didn't have the sense of -- for lack of a better word -- "foreboding," or even "menace," that destruction on that scale would have suggested. So into Photoshop the image went. After cropping it to get the Panavision-style layout you see, I duplicated the image onto a second layer, removed all traces of the original blue sky to isolate the building (tedious work, when you consider the density of the structural wreckage), then converted it to a pure monochrome image. For the underlying image, I used Alien Skin's Exposure 2 filters and tweaked the color of the sky to get the blood-tinged hue you see here. (Think Edvard Munch's "The Scream" reimagined for the cover of a Joy Division album...)

For a long time, this image was the wallpaper on my work computer, and the default on my MySpace account, and at the risk of bragging (okay, just a little), it probably got more positive comments from more people than any other picture I've taken. One MySpacer wrote, "So Upsetting. Yet Beautiful." Another, herself a photographer, said, "I would like to see more of your regular photography!" -- knowing full well that the wrestling/pinup/people stuff IS my "regular photography." And when I had an opportunity get a canvas-printed enlargement made, my day-job department director insisted that we hang it on the wall of our office.

Maybe I need to find some more buildings being torn down. Until then, this one'll do...