Stan Douglas homage....
The Hogan's Alley "photo" is actually been digitally modelled and created. I've stood in front of it, and stood in the space where Hogan's Alley is located. I've been in the bar that still has a "Hogan's Alley" neon sign in their lobby. The intriguing part of the Stan Douglas photo is that in its construction, it is perfectly exposed. The blacks are just black. The whites are just white. And the grey tones are complete and full spectrum. The print is so large that your eyes will adjust depending on what part of the print you're looking at.
The flaw? The Stan Douglas model is so large and complex that to model it at a time when it was modelled, it was too difficult to model vegetation. At least that's my theory behind the fact that there are no trees, no grass, no plants of any kind in the Stan Douglas piece. The image was created in 2014. That doesn't seem like that long ago. But the picture is huge. It's ten feet wide, and five feet tall. And you can get your nose 1 cm away from it and not see digital breakdowns or muddiness or loss of resolution. I suspect every square inch of it is printed at 300ppi. It's part of what subverts it as an art piece. Photographs aren't that big, aren't that detailed, don't have that perfect range of blacks and whites, and the missing vegetation is just one more factor that makes it feel a bit unreal.
And it is unreal. It's a picture of a place created some decades after it had disappeared. It's a thoughtful recreation, but it's all made up.
My picture? It's real. But only because I took it today. The way this city, this neighborhood is changing, it won't be there much longer. Two blocks away they are building condo towers some twenty plus stories tall. In five years all of this will be slated for development. In ten it will all be gone. And that will be that.
