#SEstreetlife photos- Beauty on the streets

 

As we all know, there's a lot of ugliness on the streets of any city.  But that's not all there is.  There's beauty out there as well.  We see what we look at.  As humans we get into habits of avoidance, we look past the things that don't seem to matter to us, or the unfamiliar, and focus on the same things, over and over.  Part of my job as a writer, artist, and photographer, like every creative person, is to take time see the things most other people miss, and point those things out.  These are a few of the beautiful photos I've taken while homeless, over the last four years.  Above, spring buds of a tree, backlit by the sun, and juxtaposed against a shaded hillside.  On the side of a shopping center, Studio City, CA, 2021.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos

Stop and smell the cow pies.  Seriously, stop and smell the piles of cow shit, horse shit, and dog shit you wander by in daily life.  Why?  Because then you'll appreciate the roses.  No one will have to remind you to stop and smell them.  Or take a photo.  Backlit white rose at the Universal City bus station in Studio City, CA, Spring 2021.  

In the Spring of 2019, while homeless in Richmond, Virginia, I was walking to a bus stop in the Shockhoe Bottom district, an area downtown, on the banks of the mighty James River.  This area has huge concrete walls to keep out major floods, and the highways and railroads there are built high off the ground.  This gives the area below a really industrial, old fashioned, almost steampunk feel to it.  As I walked to the Pulse bus stop there, with the roads and train tracks above, I saw this small tree budding.  The pink buds, backlit by the sun at dawn, with this crazy urban landscape around it, stopped me in my tracks.  I decided to take a photo, and pulled my little iPhone 5 out.  After snapping 3 or 4 pics, I looked around, and just began wandering around, shooting photos of anything that looked cool in that area.  I wound up doing that for over an hour, as the sun rose up form the eastern horizon.  I got 20 or 30 cool photos out of that morning's wandering.  This beautiful image led to many others, which I'll publish on this blog, in time.   

This photo was also shot in the Spring of 2019 in Richmond.  While living under a huge bridge, on the edge of the James River, I walked up by the Manchester Bridge every morning, and caught a bus to a McDonald's most every morning.  There's a Mickey D's in that area, but it's swamped with other bums, which meant getting to use the bathroom was always a dice roll.  So I took a bus to the sketchy Midlothian District, a few miles away.  After breakfast there, and some morning blogging or drawing, I'd go back across the street, and up a bit, to a bus stop by a big empty lot.  Across the street from the lot, was a strip club, nearby were two or three of the sketchiest motels around, all with hot and cold running crackheads.  It's not a part of town most people want to spend much time in.  Standing at the bus stop, in one of shadiest parts of the city, I saw another small tree budding.  I snapped four photos of these buds, at different focus points, from wide to tight.  Beauty in one of the ugliest parts of the city.  It's there, somewhere.  Sometimes you have to go looking for it, sometimes you just turn your head, and there it is.  

This one is a shot of dusk on Ventura Boulevard, in Studio City, looking west from the Laurel Canyon road area.  The palm trees stretch to the sky, moments after the sun dropped behind the Santa Monica mountains.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.