Stepping back from an earlier observation...

With the photographs of Wazee Street now developed and digitized, I am seeing something different in Lodo, particularly in Sam's images. His are playful, with people at the edges of frames, moving. People appear in 1937, but rarely in 1978. I'm thinking of his images of the Wazee Lounge. Mine, with the Retina I bought 40 years ago (!)--the camera that took the 1978 pictures--are static but fairly exact. His encompass the Lounge, part of 15th St., the pavement of the street itself, the Acme Building off in the distance (hello, Guy Noir), an African-American teenager moving quickly out of the left of the frame, and finally some cars moving quickly and a little randomly through the intersection. Bravo, Sam, for the vibrancy!

I always wait for people to get the heck out of the frame, but Sam includes them--like the elderly white couple moving into the intersection at 16th and Wazee.

OK, there are a lot of cars down there now, a lot of people walking around, some looking pretty rich. Lots of trees. To beat a dead horse, though, this is not the Denver I knew. Yet why doom a downtown to be a skid row neighborhood? Sometimes I think I liked it not just because of the Brooklyn memories, but because it was quiet, filled with isolated people if at all, and the same with the railroad yards. I'm pretty focused on the built environment and want that to stand out, but, like Sam, maybe now it's OK to let some people into my own pictures...let's see.

Rephotographing Denver

I have just embarked on a project to rephotograph downtown Denver, block by block, an area bounded by Arapahoe Street, Wynkoop Street, 19th Street to Cherry Creek. Thirty years ago, I documented these same street corners as a volunteer for the Colorado Historical Society. That project in turn was based on work done by a WPA photographer named Cyril Norred, who worked for the Society in 1937.

This time, I'm proud to say, that my son, Sam Fairchild, is my colleague on this project. He will do the photography on the streets and has already entered all my data linking the original accession numbers of the images with my 1978-79 images. Bravo!

The first time we ventured out, some weeks ago, we tried to find locations on Arapahoe St. Needless to say nothing was familiar from 1978 (let alone 1937). A hailstorm quickly overtook us so we spent the rest of the afternoon at Zaidy's downtown restaurant. Eating hummus was fun, but not the intended mission of the day...hopefully the afternoon storms of Denver will be over soon.

Lower Downtown (LoDo) was a skid row when I photographed in the 70's, one of many skid rows in Denver (South Broadway was another one.) The closer I got to Union Station, the seedier the streets and of course, the closer I got to Arapahoe, the more parking lots I encountered.

Why did I do this project in the first place? Stay tuned...