Neighborhoods are full of memory – especially old ones. Generations have dreamed their dreams there, loved and lost, grown up, moved on. A lot of the old Austin has been bulldozed and planked over with the same boring new architecture you see everywhere. But not Hyde Park!
It had been a long time since I even drove through Hyde Park, and in May I met the Austin Photowalkers there armed with a variety of cameras. The one I really cared about using that day was my Diana F, since I find it to be a reliable tool for photographing a sense of place. That’s what I was looking for: the place itself, the living breathing heart of the neighborhood.
To maximize my options, I set the camera to 16 exposures and didn’t bother trying to find the appropriate mask. This means the frames overlapped, just like the families moving in and out of the houses, leaving little traces of themselves behind to overlap with whoever comes next.
When I reloaded my camera, I discovered the first roll was a fat one (meaning it hadn’t wound tightly – a common “problem” in the Diana), which is the reason for the light leaks. Fortunately, I wasn’t looking for perfection!
The presence of a random castle made me almost feel like I was back home in Waco!
Often I dislike having modern cars in my photographs, but in the case of this series it doesn’t bother me as much. They are passengers, too, subject to time making them into something more interesting, something that is also a memory, eventually.
Trees in the street, funky concrete features that somebody must have really labored over once upon a time, and lots of good gates, fences, and growth! It’s such a nice neighborhood. It’s refreshing to walk around a place where all the houses don’t look the same.
Thank you for looking!
All photographs: Diana F, Kentmere Pan 400 film
Leave a Reply