beirut
When we first met, I took E to the site of an old rave warehouse I was involved in during the late 1990s. We walked around and checked out the grounds, and aside from the sticker still on the door there was no record of anything taking place.
We walked around a bit, and found ourselves down on the other side of the block, where an eerie orange glow surrounded what appeared to be an old mosque. I took some photos, which I keep unretouched.
I had to run out for some food at lunch today, and found myself down in that part of town. I had my camera with me, and decided to stop over for a quick look at what it looks like now. I stopped at the warehouse first, the sticker is still on the door and everything looks almost identical to how it looked over three years ago.
Of course, I wandered down the street to see what had become of the mosque. It was pretty dilapidated, some portions of the buildings were crumbling, and on the building in the second photo the entire roof and side wall had caved in. I would have reproduced the photos identically, but I didn’t expect to be over that way and hadn’t looked at the old photos in awhile.
E and I originally referred to the first series of photos as the “Beirut photos”, not knowing anything about the history of the buildings. In a later conversation with my friend Wes, he related that the owner of the warehouse also owned the rest of the block including the mosque, and it was part of a film set. He sent me this article and this article.
As an aside, I also wanted to shoot some photos of an underpass, which is part of the route taken to get to the warehouse. I crept along the fence separating the top of the road from a truck yard, until I arrived at the top of the cross bridge and was staring at a set of steep stairs descending down to a walkway in the belly of the whizzing traffic lanes. I hopped down a few steps and saw some homeless people slipping in and out of the shadows of the pitch black walkway, and thought better of bringing my brand new camera down into what could end up a bad situation for both parties. At that point I realized that most of what I think is worth photographing exists in bad neighborhoods, and that I should probably stick to taking zebra pics at the zoo.
