An Alley Downtown. A Saturday Walkabout
Downtown Phoenix, 12/16/2017.
As sunrise comes later in the morning during the winter season, I'm being able to manage an hour more of sleep before getting up to get things ready for my Saturday tradition of walking about camera in hand (6AM instead of 5AM). Although the warmth of the bed made me snooze a couple of more times that basically sunrise caught me just a few blocks from my house, which was good as at that point I still didn't know where I wanted to go that day. I parked my car close to the freeway and decided to walk along a canal that runs alongside I-51 and see what I see.
After having my fill of sunrise pictures, the morning well underway, I decide to head downtown, and park someplace I hadn't parked before and just walk around. Since I was left feeling good about the pictures I'd taken along the freeway at sunrise, I decide to park close to I-10, right off an exit heading downtown, in a Mexican restaurant parking lot that was just getting ready to open for the day.
As I start walking towards the freeway, I stumbled across an alley that runs behind some houses, in which they have their dumpsters., seeing that several walls had street art on them I decided to head into this alley instead.
As I walk around dumpsters (one of which had the sad message "If I catch you in my garbage I'm calling the cops") I contemplate why these street scenes call to me. Some homeless people along the alley, stretching their cold and tired bones, different discarded items littering the ground, murals adorning the alley walls, some having been spray painted on top, hell even Bill Murray's face had been pasted on one of them.
It's hard to pinpoint my interest in these chaotic scenes of refuse mixed with beauty other than I think it documents the convergence of different types of human activities, creating very unique collages, a sort of back-window into the human condition.
Andres Gonzalez
