Trip to the East Side to find Color

I am a couple days late posting this but I have been busy. I have started my third portfolio magazine, Art In the City—Outdoor Advertising Art and I have made my second post to Photovisualize, Conundrum; Can a Child Show THE WAY. Second day in a row that I did not get back over to the East Side as I had hoped I would but I have not given up on still doing it this evening. It’s hard to gin in the mornings on three hours sleep.

Anyway, two days ago I was checking on-line the activity at The Orange Show and read their thread on a mosaic mural done by children of the Cesar Chavez School on the side of a building in the 6600 block of Harrisburg. The East Side or what I generally call the Houston Ship Channel area was at one time one of my favorite places in Houston to photograph. The last several trips I have made to the area have been disappointing. When Janet and I were visiting there frequently back in the 70’s and 80’s it was very colorful, very Hispanic. Back then I referred to the area as The Barrio. Now the barrio is Houston including the area where I live. The disappointment comes not because the Hispanic population has expanded in the past thirty years but because the area that I used to enjoy for its color now seems like me more dilapidated and tawdry than colorful.

This recent trip was different. I was again inspired by the area, by the color I found and by the people I met. I did not get to photograph the mural because it was blocked by parked cars but that I will try another time so it was not great loss for now. In the process I did do a couple dozen photographs which I like very much and I took some baby steps at a new project. Well the project is not new it was actually started right after Hurricane Ike when we were without electricity for three weeks and had been percolating for quite some time before that.


Since 2002, Janet and I have been working on a personal project which I call Art in the City. It is somewhat of a continuation of her photography business, photographing works of art. We had talked about the project back when she was still actively photographing but just never got around to starting it. Then after her stoke when she could no longer participate I gave up photography for fifteen years. After she talked me into purchasing a digital camera (she didn't have to talk very hard) and by the misfortune of having to park at the far outer limits of the zoo parking lot in Hermann Park we took time since we were nearby to photograph Jim Love’s The Portable Trojan Bear and Hannah Stewart’s Atropos Key. That was all it took to rekindle the project.

We have attempted to photograph almost all of the outdoor art that we have been able to locate in and around Houston. It did not dawn on us at the time that this was a project that could never be completed. There are constantly new pieces being added and older installations are being relocated plus the desire to photograph the works under a number of lighting and weather conditions makes the project almost insurmountable. Claus Oldenberg’s Geometric Mouse X is in its third location since the project began. That has not mattered. It only means that we will always have something to photograph. The first two or three years we went at the project with a vengeance and photographed hundreds of pieces. Over the years the urgency has waned but the desire to continue the project has not. Thus the inspiration from the article about the mosaic mural to head to the East Side.

We greatly enjoy finding what I refer to as folk art and I think that what I am calling folk art at least roughly falls within the accepted definition. The Free Online Dictionary has this: “art works of a culturally homogeneous people produced by artists without formal training. The forms of such works are generally developed into a tradition that is either cut off from or tenuously connected to the contemporary cultural mainstream.” Houston may be replete with fine works of public art but in numbers it is vastly outnumbered by the homemade outdoor advertising art. They range from vehicles sawed in half and reassembled to men made from mufflers to simple manikins displaying garments on the sidewalks.

During our electricity outage after Ike, I approached The Furniture Factory on I-45 near Parker and was granted permission to come onto their property to photograph an assembly that extended for at least a block along the feeder street of vehicles, furniture, flags and stuffed toys. Yesterday I approached the manager of a neighborhood convenience store to go onto their property to photograph colorful murals on the side and back of their building and then the owners of two tailor shops or design boutiques to photograph their sidewalk displays. It is not a necessity to get permission as long as you are photographing from a public area such as a roadway or sidewalk. And I suppose that most would not object to you coming onto private property but it is always a good idea to ask. In this case, all three were extremely congenial and welcomed the photography. I was encouraged that my cynicism was misplaced and that life might be as bad as I was thinking. I came home very excited about photography again—not an easy achievement.

The goals of the Art in the City--Outdoor Advertising Art is two fold. First, of course, it is a photography project so I want to hopefully take photographs that have some value simply as a photograph. But secondly a more worthy goal is to show respect for the creations of the artist and to give some degree of preservation to the work via photography. This is the purpose of the portfolio magazine, to use as a sales aid to enlist the cooperation of more store owners and folk artists to engage with the project.