I have been collecting before and after images of Houston for
the past five years. My mother started a ritual of shooting street scenes and “Mom
and Pop Shops” in the 1970’s, I stole her idea in the 1980’s and continue the
process today.
While working through this
ever growing, dense, almost getting boring collection, I wondered how can I
simplify this? “What else can these images represent? How can they tell a story
in a thought-provoking, but easy, straightforward way?
The first thing I did was
break the images down into categories.
Each category represents
all the things we seek as we roam this earth. Some are interchangeable and all
are strangely generational.
i.e.
The
Record Exchange was a shop, but at some
point, it was a house where someone lived. Today the lot is a complex where lots of people live.
The Raven Grill is a restaurant, but used
to be a liquor store next door to a laundromat where my sisters and I helped fold
the clothes for our mom, and next door to the place where she bought her booze on the
way home.
The Renaissance Condominiums
stand on the same lot where our mom bought us our semi formals called Battelstein’s.
Here are examples of the
seven categories I started out with:
1) Homes / Dwellings. We all need a place to lay our heads.
2) Places of Worship. Many believe
in organized religion, others simply believe.
3) Schools/Education. We are sent off to
learn and attend schools at all levels.
4) Stores/Shopping. We love stuff, and some
of us think there is never enough.
5) Money/Jobs/Occupations. We work so we can buy stuff
we think we need.
6) Restaurants/Bars/Food. We like people to serve us and watch us eat.
7) Legacies / Families / Friends. We all have pursuits and achieve greatness.
Later I realized I could siphon it down even more to three
categories:
1) The Past
2) The Present
3) The Future
Then I started playing around with the
images adding my favorite movie clips and screenshots on the topic of time. I started
making “timecards” which reminded me how so many of us choose to live an institutional life, working by someone else’s
clock.
Soon after my “timecard_period” a
friend invited me to join him on a business trip to Dubai and get away from it
all. I jumped at the chance.
There I visited “The Frame” representing the past, present and future of Dubai and learned that Dubai was an oil rich block of sand for three decades but dried out by 1990. The leaders of the city took it in stride and decided to re-imagine the city, rapidly developing it to be a tourist destination like no other, proving that the world doesn’t need that much oil. They can get plenty from other countries.
What the world needs now is to see and
savor the beauty these leaders created in Dubai for all to enjoy.
