Blue Moon over Thurman Street

I had dinner with my friend Alex last night and mentioned I've been studying street photography. That reminded him of a book he has, written by our neighbor, Ursula K. LeGuin, with photographs by Roger Dorband. It's a great idea, that book.

Dorband took hundreds of pictures all along the length of Thurman Street, which is just a few blocks from where I live now. LeGuin wrote poems to go with his pictures. They didn't try to tell the history or anthropology. They didn't dwell on city planning or urban development. They just tried to get a series of authentic pictures of the life and the structures on one street, which happens to be the street where LeGuin lives, taken over a few years in the 80s. I pored over the book for a couple of hours after I came home from Alex's last night, and then today I set out to make my own pictures of Thurman Street, bearing in mind how it was back then, holding her poems in my mind. Poems like this:

What does a house hold?
Sometimes a fullness
of shadows.
Light lies outside
on patterns of glass
and wood more fragile
yet. And there are
forgettings. The held,
the kept, the lost,
the leaf shadows.
--Ursula K. LeGuin.

Thurman Street is more prosperous than it was in the 80s. Telephone booths have come down. Old houses have been replaced by upscale condos, rowhouses, town houses with open beam ceilings and kitchen islands. The little co-op grocery has become a gourmet food store. Thurman Street is for rich people now, with a spa and some boutiques, a patisserie with seven-dollar pastries. It doesn't grip my imagination. After I watched a scatter of clouds turn rosy pink over the Fat Tire Farm bike store I turned to walk back home, not entirely satisfied with any of my pictures, ten of which are here. And then I saw the moon over Thurman Street in a blue sky, a couple of vine tendrils hurling themselves into the blue, a wooden bird guarding the building where the bento barbecue is.

I'd love to do a similar project. I'd love to pick a street and take pictures on that one street and write about it, maybe poems. But it won't be Thurman Street.