GRAPHIC ABSTRACTION ON DIVISION STREET

FEBRUARY 20, 2026

                                     FINAL ABSTRACTION

This week I would like to explore one image that I captured in a rainy walk on Division Street last month. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a month and a half since the New Year, but you know how it has been going in the world. Every day a new outrage, and it has been getting harder and harder to concentrate on art. Fran and I managed to get tear gassed for the first time in our lives a few weeks ago. Believe me, that tends to focus the mind, but not towards photography.

                                                                ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT

This image is typical of my work in the sense that it’s not exactly an image that leaps off the page as a document of a rainy walk in the neighborhood. It is another example of a momentary observation that certainly didn’t stop me in my tracks - and if someone else had observed my interest in this scene, I would have forgiven them if they wondered what the hell I was doing.

At the almost certain risk of ruining this image for a lot of people, I will begin by admitting what this is in the real world. I’ve found that a lot of viewers don’t like “feeling fooled” when this photographic magician gives away the goods, but here goes. This is really a close-up of a bus shelter on Division Street. Our local transit agency discovered that the instant reaction to putting up attractive glass bus shelters around town was that they became transparent canvases for particularly nasty graffiti artists intent on ruining them. It was one thing to apply the usual spray paint, which come off pretty easily due to special coatings, or to try a rock, which can destroy the glass but doesn’t lend itself to any measure of personal notaraity.  But then vandals realized that they could scratch musings into the glass, and more creative solutions were required. Using graphic art to fight graffiti has become the go-to strategy. The graphics cannot remove the graft, but it can so obscure it as to render it pretty hard to find. The transparent nature of the shelters is mostly preserved, and the graffiti “artists” seem to realize the futility of their efforts by mostly leaving the modified shelters alone.

                                     INITIAL ABSTRACTION - CROP TO A SQUARE, ATTEMPT A CERTAIN "STRAIGHTENING", CONVERT TO BLACK AND WHITE

The initial snapshot is obviously not exactly closely observed. The proportions are all wrong, the graphics are nowhere near being “straight”, and the colors are a pretty grim gray. The first thing to do was to try to move the image towards abstraction by removing it’s relationship to “real life.” Graphics were emphasized by cropping to a square. I used the leveling tool to try to straighten the image to some extent, but the perspective shift of each “line” of leaning books or what ever these scratching call to mind made that pretty impossible. If you think my efforts are not very convincing, you should see how much worse Lightroom’s perspective tools failed.

                                     ADJUST THE BLACK POINT

It remained to convert the image to black and white since whatever colors were present didn’t seem to contribute anything at all to the image. Finally I adjusted the Black point so that the exposure was seriously under exposed and the emphasis given to the white graphics on a very dark background. The raindrops are still there to give serious observers some clue that this is a piece of glass.

                                      FINAL IMAGE - ADJUST EXPOSURE TO DARKEN THE BLACKS AND LIGHTEN THE WHITE MARKINGS

So there it is - another example of my attempt to make something out of nothing, to create some magic on a simple walk down the street. It is okay if you don’t particularly see the point, but maybe you do, and since it’s my art, it doesn’t really matter to me if you do. Try something like this on your next walk to liberate your art from the “subject” to your own observations of the world. I feel these are much more important