Uploads from wertz·, tagged awertz, with geodata

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:40:34 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

This is the last of my Lakeside posts. It is a strange thing thing to me, this work. some of it my most technically proficient, taken nearly 10 years ago. when i was 22.

It was only a year before that I had taken my first photography course, living on the jersey shore in a cut-rate seaside boarding house efficiency, spending as many mornings as I could out shooting and otherwise soaking up the surprisingly rich collection of photo books on hand at the brookdale community college library.

I was out in Denver for the summer, the one between my junior and senior year of college, for an internship with a statewide non-profit historic preservation organization. I thought perhaps that's what I was going to do, but being out there something else was evident. I spent more time and energy driving and exploring, photographing but also just seeing. It didn't help that I made the drive out to denver from pennsylvania myself, and stopped in cincinnati, detroit, chicago, and st. louis on the way. It was a deep revelation.

And so in Denver I was just beginning to see what that possibility meant. Living ten minutes from Lakeside it became a home away from home. but so was the denver public library, and the stacks of books I checked out there. so was the running path in the park outside my apartment where i ran daily. so were weekends spent in the mountains out beyond boulder, and the trips south to garden of the gods, and a creaky wood-planked room filled with antique arcade games in Manitou Springs. As I made my way through the summer and the requirements of the internship led me across the state interviewing leaders in preservation, I came to the realization that there wasn't a single job in the field I would forseeably want to take. (a predictiment that is perhaps endemic to my personality, considering my appropriation of warehouse work in lieu of meaningful employment) but nonetheless, there were so many things I loved that had absolutely nothing to do with the rarefied causes of preservation. The dregs out on the edges of Colfax ave. for instance. the motels and dive bar outposts. the disjointed-barely surviving third-rate economy of means and subsistence living. And while I generally supported the aims of preservation, the ability to do so unequivocally waned. I could not think of myself as surely and neccessarily right. There were certain fundamental contradictions at the very heart of preservation. ie what are we preserving? ok the building. but what does that mean? what about the place. well that changes. the nature and demographics will change. the neighborhood will change. the signage will change. it all will change. we are all in flux. but the building will remain and the storefront gets restored with an approriate remodeling in respect to its long distant past. and all will be well with the world. well. perhaps.

i am not against this. nor am i for this. rather it is. it's just not that great of a concern. not the central concern. it just is. it happens or it does not. what matters is being aware. to be present at that first moment of apprehension. to see with certain and distinct eyes. to make sense of the things that lay before you. to make a record. to witness, to share, to speak from the experience that is both momentary and fleeting and happens as only you happen. once. only from this type of first-hand experience does anything really make sense. but this is something I've come to in hindsight.

photography was such a specific thing to me when I took these pictures. it seemed there were only specific things to be photographed.

I still partially suffer from this today, it is perhaps a basic aspect of how I approach the medium, and of how i see. And while I am no less interested in 'things' I am less interested in them as the focus of a picture, and if they are the focus of the picture, they should be the part of a greater whole, at best they will be but an aspect, or an overiding clue. I use light as a discriminating mechanism, but it still leaves me short. the over-dependence upon objects has left me wanting. Anyone can say in a photograph… "look! here's what I found." but if it comes across as. "look! here's what I see" that becomes invariably more interesting. and deeply more rewarding.

for now I'll be pulling back a bit from flickr. not putting up that much new work but still posting some shots. Since I've moved up to NY I haven't taken any time to really sit with and look at what I've done so far. The pursuit can sometimes be a means of escape if not held in check. The need for constant stimulation through producing new work can get in the way of growing and moving forward. I need to do a bit of culling and curating. Since I don't really work in 'projects' I need to find and come to terms with the editorial thread that connects the work that I do. At least make sense of it, what's come of late. Do a solid round of printing. Make an edit, decide on a sequence, hold it in hand. look with eyes from a different aim. be a difficult bastard, in short.

I will still be here, I can't imagine not following the work of so many exceptional people. gifted with sight in the most pure sense of the word. it daily informs my experience. it is a tremendous thing. the curiousity. the passion. the intense awareness and the gaze and knowledge that it's not to be attempted with outsourced ideals. ---andrew

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:10:10 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 22:09:22 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

below is a piece that I wrote accompanying 8 of these images in the March 2005 issue of (the now defunct) Wonkavison Magazine.

This is the text as i wrote it then. un-edited. (as much as I would like to go back and tinker and tighten things up, i haven't) and I'm including it here because it's inextricably linked to the images as I see them. hopefully I will write a little something to post with the last of the series. between looking back and looking forward. till' then.

thanks everyone for your responses, it's been a pleasure sharing these. i am quite thankful, the work shared here on flickr engages me day after day.

-Andrew

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Night falls over Denver as the sun recedes behind the Rocky Mountains slowly bleeding the light from a clear blue afternoon sky and gently suffocating it into black. The period between dusk and darkness has a molten quality to it. The French have a saying for this, “Entre chien et loup” – between the dog and the wolf. This saying does more than simply describe a time of day, it pins down a feeling, the inescapable experience of change; the hinge point between two very distinct worlds. Anyone who has stayed up all night and spent part of it outside knows the way the sky breaks from its black chains as the sunrise slowly comes to sweep away what remains of the night.
I often feel that these two times of day sum up my life completely. The opening and the closing, the coming and the going, all the greetings and goodbyes, the endless process wrapped up and expressed in the daily cycle of our earth’s revolution while orbiting the sun.

Life hinges on a rollercoaster as it does in the cosmos: as the cars ratchet up that first steep hill and come to a crawl oh so slowly before the peak, upon the fluid rails all the weight of potential energy gets transferred into kinetic. The crack of a whip flowing downhill. That surge of life about to bottom out three-quarters of the way into the plunge. All thoughts are removed and in their place is sheer exhilaration. All that energy bleeding in glorious fashion, through turns and loops, re-distributed and conserved, and yet all receding in degrees from that initial dive.

Early evening is when cars begin filing into the right lane of Sheridan Blvd. on their way to Lakeside Park, where two dollars will get you parking and admission. It doesn’t draw the crowds of bigger parks, but it always seems busy. Early evening is also when they switch on all the lights at Lakeside. Coming around the curve of I-70 towards Denver, the whole park burns like a mini-oasis in the night reflecting off the lake that spans the distance between the highway and the park. Above it all stands the park’s entrance tower, dating back to 1918 and modeled after the one at Coney Island’s fabled Luna Park.

These photographs are the testament of a love affair. In the summer of 2002 I took a job working in Denver for the summer and lived just six blocks away from Lakeside. Many days of mine were spent there after work, playing games of skee-ball (and throwing my first 400 game), riding the coaster, or just sitting in the Royal Grove Pavilion with my journal and soaking up the atmosphere of children’s laughter, of shrieks and screams echoing through the air; all that clink-clanking of metal wheels upon metal tracks.

Really, this is a two-part love affair. First, of a place where happiness, pleasure, excitement and laughter are the currency of life. The second is simply a love affair with light. Of neon wrought with an artisan’s hand; reflecting off aluminum, reflecting off the earth, the paved earth. I’ve always entered a trancelike state in the presence of neon. The unnatural brilliance of its color, and yet it’s totally natural, as chemistry taught me; the elemental gas when infused with an electrical current at different frequencies will produce innumerable variations of colored light. Some of these photos were taken in the blue of early night that I described earlier, but most were not. Nonetheless the anchor that blue provides against the falling night can be found in the warm and cool glow of neon. The light illuminates the vacuum. The same can be said for the faces. The trace movements of people caught in these time exposure photographs.

These are the two worlds I live in, one of laughter and the other of light. Call it nature and nurture. Nature in bricks and mortar as much as earth and sky. We complete the whole. Our lives’ work gives sound to trees that fall alone in the forest. All we can hope for is the transference of some portion of that initial energy; some kind of truth, perceived and internalized, which is then expressed and eternalized in the passing of future moments.

Home is a state of mind and as we move through this world we must not forget the people and places which make us feel at home. Lakeside is one of those places to me. It is a sweet and bitter memory, if only because it is two thousand miles away, but I still dream of it as it exists in my memory, as it has existed before I ever came into this world. I was lucky enough to cross paths with it when I did. To take the train ride around the lake on those cars which were once used in St. Louis’s 1904 Worlds Exposition. Sneaking a kiss from the girl by my side, any girl, it wouldn’t have mattered. The place was so inexplicably perfect on a cool summer night that you felt in love just being there alone. A witness to the mystery, half-explained in the moment.

With these pictures, the nights seem alive once again. Frozen in that moment, of a mother holding her child as he reaches towards the pressed quarter machine. Of so many Mexican families from the surrounding neighborhoods, packing up their vans on a Friday night and making Lakeside their destination. All the little kids running around and bumping into you, never breaking stride, taking the tickets you leave behind at the skee-ball machine. The brooding teenage angst traveling in groups of three, eyeing up everyone they pass with a snicker and smirk, but somehow you remember yourself as they are and you keep going. The bored workers at the funnel cake stand on the far end of the park where no one visited. They always shut it down early, especially when you were hungry for one. Of doubling up in the tight car of the wild mouse ride which surely wasn’t made with your six-foot and two-twenty frame in mind. Of that early morning captured on other rolls of film, where you got there at seven a.m. with the groundskeepers coming to clean up from the night before. Shooting the rides in the early morning light; the sun reflecting off of the calm water of the lake into the auto skooter pavilion and cascading across the horses of the carousel. Their wooden faces cracked and weathered, needing paint, needing lacquer. Of peering up at the star ride sitting there abandoned and out of use, after seeing it in a postcard on eBay dated 1922; wondering how this hulking wheel of metal sticking into the sky is still standing here eighty years later. Of sitting at the back of the Eatway Inn with the owner and her daughter (who’s your age) two hours after closing, drinking black coffee, listening to stories, asking questions. The history of the park, of the rides. What remains? What was lost? How the owner’s father who was the Coca-Cola salesman for the entire Denver area before buying Lakeside in the early twenties took the old marble topped bar from Union Station in downtown and had it installed in the back of the cafeteria. The same counter which stands today.

Somehow these memories provide an elixir. They continue to inform and educate me long after their moment has passed. But perhaps the moment hasn’t passed. Perhaps this is the moment, my remembering, these photos, the eye and the mind of the reader picking up this magazine, finding their own meaning where even I can’t see.

Yes, I’d like that.

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:49:43 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:19:31 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:05:00 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

I took this series while living about a mile and a half away from lakeside park in the summer of 2002. It was my first summer away from home. it was my first summer with this camera. i had an internship in denver. the record remains something special and unique.

it will continue thru the new year. I think i've got an even dozen including this one to post.

they go out to my dad first off. that's all.

andrew

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:06:20 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 22:51:28 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:25:45 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:27:40 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Lakeside Park, Denver, CO. 2002

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:52:48 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:37:12 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Sharon Springs, NY

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:00:04 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Sharon Springs, NY

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:27:43 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Cohoes, NY

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:27:35 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Cohoes, NY

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:27:52 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Cohoes, NY

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:27:31 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Cohoes, NY

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:27:50 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Cohoes, NY

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:27:27 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Cohoes, NY

nobody@flickr.com (wertz·) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:26:19 -0800

wertz· posted a photo:

Cohoes, NY