When "Still Life" Isn't

Many of the pictures I've taken over the years are of things that don't move. Landscapes or still lifes. But they do change. Sometimes overnight.

Friday's Plain Sight picture was a case in point.

Here, again, is the picture I took at 6:48 pm on Thursday evening as I left the office and walked to my regular parking spot at municipal lot 10J in Morristown.

I wasn't sure if the board was new or I had just never noticed it before. But things looked strikingly different.

The sun was low and strong.

Light is the first reason no landscape or "still life" can be left till later. (I put still life in quotes because I don't arrange objects; I find things that strike me and photograph them as they are.) In a matter of minutes a picture can disappear before your eyes because the light has changed.

But over the years it has always amazed me how things that seem permanent can change. So I never, if possible, walk away thinking, "I'll come back and shoot that later."

Several years ago that became a rule in my mind.

My next door neighbor (on the other side; you'll know what I mean if you were reading Plain Sight in mid-May) had a very old, handmade, wooden basketball backboard on the front of his garage.

The backboard was shaped like a cross-section of a cupcake. The basket itself had long ago disappeared. The backboard was made of plywood, which was warping and peeling, and the faded lime green green paint was a shambles.

It was a strangely beautiful and fascinating object. I had been looking at it for years. One day I decided to photograph it, which I could do easily from my own backyard.

The next day I pulled into my driveway and the backboard was gone.

A team of painters had taken it down and were now repainting the garage and the house.

Go figure. How weird, how funny.

History repeated itself Friday.

When I pulled into my favorite spot on Friday morning, a guy was well along painting the sheet of orange plywood black.

It turned out he works for LB Electric, and they had put up the steel posts and board on Thursday. (So it was new. I had not totally lost my marbles.)

Why? They were going to move the meters and boxes from the pole (which you can see in both pictures) to the board.

Why were they moving the equipment?

Neither the painter nor his foreman--who stopped by while we were talking to give the painter money to buy them something at Dunkin Donuts for their upcoming break--had any idea.

Nor did they have any need to know.

Tags: Morristown | photography

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