Local Topography
July 18, 2025A Portrait of St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church
August 18, 2024
Nothing feels as more foolish as searching for the sublime in the mundane and the familiar. And perhaps one can add that no pursuit is more pointless as to attempt to excel at a discipline that some have already given their lives to (I’m thinking—Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Dorothea Lange). This is what I feel every time I try to create art for my own pleasure. I feel the joy of soaring for a time, only to look up and be in despair at the sight of the endless expanse, where others have already gone.
Still, I do not feel hopeless. “Be the historian of your own town,” as some have already suggested. And as T.S. Eliot puts it,
Because I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place / And what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place, —T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Now although I do not fancy myself a minor historian (perhaps documentarian would be more appropriate), I agree with Eliot that “what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.” I guess what I want to say is, it is a sheer joy to live in the concrete reality of the moment, when one attempts to engage their senses with the world and in the process produce something that is good, true, and beautiful—no matter what has gone before, in fact, no matter what.
Since encountering Sebastian Selgado’s work about a decade ago, I always wanted to build my own black and white body of photographic work. I confess I consider him the greatest fine art photographer worthy of emulation. His work also convinced me of the efficacy of black and white photography in conveying timeless, human, and spiritual messages. And while I will never be anything close to Selgado, I am here, in my own time, in my own place, in my own existence.
While I don’t intend for this series to be a nostalgic stare at the past, I can not help but to appreciate the beauty in the old and the historic. Last week, I started with St. James Lutheran Church and Fire Station No. 2 in Morganton Road. This week, I took a photo of St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church in Ramsey street. St. Joseph’s was built in 1896. At the time of this writing, that would be 128 years ago—to put it in perspective, that would be 46,720 days, or 1,121,280 hours ago. I really like the primary Spanish accent of this church, a bell shaped tower that is a visual echo of the bell it contains. Combined with the English Gothic influence and shingled facade, you really get a visual character that is not as common or easy to find, especially in the South. St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A few yards away from the church is an old, large, wooden cross. Perhaps this was one of the first crosses on display when the church was first built, but I have not really talked to anybody to confirm my assumption. A red-tailed hawk was attentively stationed at the peak of the cross, which I thought would have an interesting symbolism in the photograph (A symbol of resurrection—the hawk in place of the phoenix? traditional symbol for St. John the evangelist?) Nevertheless, a very good photo, in my view.
A Portrait of Smitty’s Cleaners
August 25, 2024
This is now my third week documenting my own city through medium format, black and white digital photography. The last two weekends included historic places and churches. For this week, I documented something secular and ordinary, yet certainly a landmark in their own right. Smitty’s cleaners sits at the tip of the triangle intersection separating Fort Bragg Road and Morganton Road before you merge into Hay street. Right next to it is the Cape Fear Regional Theatre. The steeple of Highland Presbyterian Church is seen from the west side of the building.
Why did I choose to photograph this building? Certainly for its character and its unique location. You can’t quite miss this establishment whether you’re coming from historic downtown side or the booming, commercial Skibo Road side. Although not at the heart of downtown, it certainly has etched its memory on my mind—the distinctive cursive typography casually mixed with the sans serif font gives it a childlike aura, like the guy you can talk to anytime inside the classroom. I guess imagery like this have grown on me, because moments like those have been away from me for a long time.
Next to it is another building I casually took a photo of. It’s the light, man. It’s how the light creates that crisp shadow and clean breaks between wall and the hedges. It’s the style of the door and the light covers, and the L-shaped frame holding the roof. Heck, even the mailbox has its own identity. It’s that ordinary stillness on a late summer afternoon that endows mundane moments with some meaning.
I have to be careful though, sometimes photographs are just photographs.
A Portrait of a Railroad Car
September 01, 2024
Faded artwork, creeping vines, rust. It is quite impossible to miss this abandoned railroad car that sits at the intersection of South Reilly and Cliffdale Road. Similar to my photograph of Smitty’s Cleaners, I consider this car a landmark in its own right, and had always been intriguing to me as photographic subject matter. As a matter of fact, this is not the first time I documented this car. Here are some of my photos from February 2023:
So why document it again in black and white?
Well, that is a little difficult to explain without sounding too pretentious or quasi-nostalgic. But I’m looking for that feeling after going through a beautiful coffee table book, an aesthetic experience if you would indulge me. I am trying to create an experience, not just from one photograph, but a whole corpus of black and white work that is a combination of what people may consider historic and ordinary—the things we consider sacred, and things we see and ignore everyday.
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