Savannah, 2000

“The perception of beauty is a moral test.” Thoreau

There is an “old” joke in my history-obsessed hometown. How many Savannahians does it take to change a burned out light bulb? Four. One to replace the bulb and three to form a committee to talk about how nice the old one was. These piers are already replaced, and I’m a committee of only one, but allow me to make a case for remembrance.

This is the northeast corner of Savannah’s Historic Landmark District (essentially the early city), and the rotting pilings are long gone and there is a bright, shiny new public river-walk along this shore, almost all the way to the industry in the background. The grassy area to the right, Eastern Wharf, is now an ongoing development of condos, apartments, high end hotel, retail, service businesses, and two large parking garages, partly planned to help siphon off some of the traffic going into downtown. It’s a well done development, and safer, and much more useful than the empty space that was there for so long, but … it reminds me….

The first time I saw Times Square was in the fall of 1967, on a weekend pass from Fort Monmouth, NJ. It was pretty seedy, with lots of adult theaters, and prostitutes easily available (so I was told), with hotels where the USO could get cheap rooms for soldiers. These days, anytime I’m in Manhattan I try to go to Times Square and walk up the red steps, and it’s all bright and shiny, and family friendly, but it’s not as interesting. It all seems predictable, commercialized, sanitized.

There is a sub-genre of photography sometimes deprecatingly called “Ruin Porn” and I confess some attraction to the subject matter. All the stuff that was once bright and shiny eventually shows the vicissitudes of time and fortune, and that is a lot more interesting visual story.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index