Alleys & Ruins no. 107, Shadow Web (2008, St Louis, MO, 12:15am)
I take hours one night walking most of the half mile where the MacArthur Bridge hovers over St Louis before it finally hits solid ground. I still haven’t learned my lesson about hauling everything before I know what I want to shoot: my camera, tripod, lights, dragging it through mud, climbing wet beams, scraping against rust. And yet that part is fine. The real weight is being alone, again. It’s not like the early days of my night shoots when the whole point was to be alone. My attention the entire time is divided between looking for a photo and looking over my shoulder.
I find a lovely spot: steel beams crisscrossing above me, shadows spilling across the wall. The light is faint, so I set up to do several 30-minute exposures. I get absorbed in the work, grinding my way through the shots, filthy from the mud and the wet rust. Again half my attention locked on creating the best photo I can, the other half scanning the darkness for sound and movement. But I build the photograph layer by layer.
When it’s done, I start packing up. I’m unhooking the camera from the tripod when I see, to my infinite delight, that the tiniest little spider has spun a small, simple web – just a few strands – across the lens shade. It’s now sitting patiently, directly in the center of the lens.
Some nearly invisible part of the spider working away, spinning its web is probably in the photograph somewhere, though I haven’t been able to see it. When I look at the image today I like to think that the little fellow managed to thread itself into the web of beams and shadows that grabbed my attention in the first place.
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