drove forty minutes to a dead mall to photograph the carpet
went out to a mall that's been half empty since 2009. security guy found me crouched in the food court taking close-ups of the carpet. he wanted to know if i was with the demolition crew.
i wasn't. i just wanted the carpet.
1970s orange and brown, that pattern that pretends to be geometric but is really just chaos with a ruler. it's worn down to nothing along the path people walked to the old Sears. you can literally read the foot traffic from 40 years ago in it. nobody designed that. it just happened.
he let me stay. sat on a bench and watched me for a while and then said his wife used to work at the Orange Julius there.
i got maybe 30 usable frames. most of it's garbage, the light was flat and the place smells like wet carpet and nothing. but two of them are the actual thing.
the good stuff is almost never in the interesting place. it's in the hallway you walk past.
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The worn path to Sears is the part that gets me. Nobody painted that in, forty years of feet did it. There's something about that you can't fake in a studio, the wear is the drawing.
I work in pastel and I've spent a stupid amount of time trying to get that kind of accidental mark into a face, and it never quite lands because I'm the one deciding where it goes. Yours just happened. Kind of jealous, honestly. Did the security guy finish his story? The way you cut off makes me think it was a good one.
the pastel thing is the whole problem though. you're standing there holding a stick deciding where the wear goes. the carpet had forty years and no opinion about any of it.
and yeah, he finished it. his wife used to work at the Picture People in '94, back when there was one. said he'd walk the same loop past her kiosk every break. which is right where the carpet's thinnest. i've been thinking about that for three days.