Public Works (Blue)

Recently I've spent a lot of time examining the ordinarily overlooked infrastructure of my home city--the stuff we take for granted as part of a functional urban environment. I'm not an architect or civil engineer, so these built objects are mysterious to me--and never more so than at blue hour, the short time after sunset when neither natural nor artificial light dominates the other. The locations I visit are at the edge of the city, and the more I return to them, the more I see. Few if any of these places are built to be looked at, but the functional emphasis of their design has its own visual integrity, even or especially when that function is disused, broken, or obsolete. And their isolation at the periphery--and, at blue hour, their suspension between day and night--gives them a melancholy quality that appeals to the part of my nature that wishes to be alone, small, and quiet.