Scaffolding

When I moved into my current home (on the 15th floor of a condo), it was with the understanding that I would be moving into construction. The condo corporation had just contracted to replace all the windows and repair the building envelope. (Until I moved here, I had no idea that buildings have envelopes.) No sooner had I settled into my new space than a truck arrived and men started hauling metal poles out of the back. In short order, they’d put up scaffolding along the front of the building.

Although scaffolding sites are temporary, and shift dynamically across the face of the city, the fact of scaffolding itself is a permanent feature of modern city life. Forgive the oxymoron, but scaffolding is an ephemeral permanency. There’s always a new project underway, and always a demand for temporary struts to support it, or to protect passers-by on the sidewalk below. Once the structure is complete, the metal bars and stagings disappear, only to pop up somewhere else.

In documenting city life, I would be remiss if I didn’t allow scaffolding to creep into some of my photographs. In a way, my documentary obsession is a kind of scaffolding. I hold in mind a blueprint of the city. Call it a Platonic ideal if you like. It aspires to completeness: a whole vision: the city’s deepest truth. One day I’ll publish a photobook about the city, and implicit in its publication will be the claim that I’m presenting the city as it really is. That claim is a fiction, of course. I’m not omniscient; I don’t have a godlike perch from which to survey everything simultaneously, from the Rouge to the Humber, and from the lake shore north. I offer a sampling of what I see and, for a brief time, like metal rods and stagings, it props up a larger vision which can’t yet reveal itself.