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Desolate Places bio picture

Desolate Places: Michael Bowman

A great photograph shows the world as it is, not how it should be.

An artist’s expression is a culmination of all the experiences of their lives.  The good. The bad. The ugly.  The beautiful.  It all gets absorbed into the brain and mashed together.  The experiences are broken down to their basic levels, sometimes to such fundamental things as light and dark, and are reconstituted and reformulated.  Later, these basic principles and formative experiences are found reflected in the real world and presented as they are in testament to those experiences, or the real world is manipulated to reflect the artist’s vision.  Either way, that vision is a product of all the experiences of that artist’s life.  For better or worse.


I will not go into the details of the experiences that have produced my vision.  Suffice to say they have been good and bad, light and dark.  They have produced a view of the world that is mine alone.  It appeals to some.  Repulses others.


I find beauty in things that others overlook or ignore.  Places and people that have been abandoned, neglected or forgotten.

s. lander st.

April 19, 2010


s. lander st., originally uploaded by Desolate Places.

Newcomer

The young man showed up in Newburgh and was dead before most people even knew his name. The police had never run into him. On the street, where word travels as fast as Nextel blips, people just said a Jamaican boy got killed over at a weed house. He was 22 years old and named Orlando Grant, they learned later.

Newburgh can be tight as family. Longtime East Enders can name seemingly every person on the river side of Lutheran Street. The exception is the newcomers, often immigrants. Some follow family into the city and stay; some pass through for a bit on their way to somewhere else. Grant had come legally from Jamaica just a few months before police found him shot to death in a Lander Street basement. It was an empty building – a couple mattresses upstairs, steel grates on the windows and a reinforced door. Grant was dead before people in the neighborhood noticed he was even there. (Text taken from the Times Herald Record, Special Report on Newburgh Homicides – 15 Since Jan 1 2008).

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