Coronado Bridge from Chicano Park

Author's Comments

The bridge does something to the light here that I have not seen replicated anywhere else in the city. It throws a vast slab of shade over the park, and inside that shade the murals glow in a way they could not in direct sun. This is open shade as a kind of natural softbox, and it holds all afternoon. The columns are not pretty in any conventional sense. They are infrastructure, the kind of brutal mid-century concrete that usually signals neglect. But the artists who claimed this space in the seventies understood something about scale, and the murals climb the pillars with a confidence that matches the structure above. I come in the afternoon because that is when the contrast between the lit world beyond the bridge and the shaded world beneath it is at its most cinematic. Stand at the right angle and you can frame a column, fully painted, against the hot bright street behind it. That is the photograph. The detail work rewards a longer lens and a slow walk - faces, hands, text in Spanish and English layered over decades of repainting and restoration. The wide shots are harder. The bridge is so massive that it flattens in a single frame, and you have to work to give the eye somewhere to rest. The crowds are almost never a problem. This is a working neighborhood, not a tourist circuit, and the park belongs to the people who live around it. Photograph with that in mind. The murals are not a backdrop. They are a record, and the best images I have made here are the ones that treat them that way.

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