Portland

In my last post, I mentioned that I attended a PDX Film League darkroom printing event at Franklin Foto. While I was in Portland, I stayed an extra day to explore a few neighborhoods and do a bit of street photography on film. My camera of choice was my scrapy Nikon FM10, which I had loaded with Kodak Tri-X 400 black and white film.

I started out in St. Johns. Being a film photographer, naturally my first stop was at Blue Moon Camera and Machine. I stocked up on film and bought a well-priced Zoom-Nikkor 35-105mm f/3.5-4.5 lens that I had my eye on for a while. I also had the pleasure to be helped by and chat with Ashley Jennings, who specializes in historical processes and particularly tintype photography. There’s no doubt about it: the technique of her work is refreshingly unique, and its ethereal aesthetics are simply stunning.

After doing a bit of shopping at Blue Moon, I wandered around. St. Johns is a rather distinct neighborhood in Portland. After all, it was its own incorporated city before Portland annexed it in 1915.

To be sure, there was some life on North Lombard Street, the main drag that runs through the little downtown there. Still, the area felt a little sad and hollowed out. I saw a number of vacant storefronts and a few unstable vagrants milling around. I’m sure the fact that I was there on a cold weekday morning with few other non-vagrant folks strolling around didn’t help matters.

Next, I moved on to North Mississippi Avenue. Much like many other Portland neighborhoods in the last ten years or so, North Mississippi has changed dramatically. Many of the old yet still affordable housing options and storefronts have given way to the forces of gentrification.

It had been a while since I wandered up and down North Mississippi, and, holy moly, had it changed in that time. For instance, Paxton Gate, a San Francisco-based seller of oddities and curiosities along with an ample selection of rather expensive taxidermy specimens, has a location on North Mississippi. As I checked out their shop space, I wondered to myself how on earth they make money. But their phone kept ringing with customer inquiries, and I realized that they must be making a go of it somehow.

In all, North Mississippi felt like it was realizing more of a stereotype than the kind of weirdness for which Portland has become famous—or infamous, depending on your perspective. There is the artistry of the unusual, and then there is conformity to a certain flavor of non-conformity that crosses into the realm of the cliché. It’s no longer weird when everyone and everything is the same kind of weird.

A short drive east from North Mississippi Avenue brought me to Northeast Alberta Street. If North Mississippi had a significant period of gentrification over the past decade or so, then Northeast Alberta’s transformation was especially intense. Many if not most of the typical Portland chains have a presence there: Salt and Straw, Bamboo Sushi, Harlow, Collage, Petite Provence, Little Big Burger, Pine State Biscuits, Rudy’s Barbershop, Bollywood Theater... the list goes on and on. I got a whiff of the yoga-studio bourgeois-bohemian thing on North Mississippi. Alberta Street utterly reeked of it.

I wandered up and down Northeast Alberta Street, had lunch, and took off.

Next up: Northwest 23rd Avenue. That part of town has always felt more affluent. Northwest Portland has the kind of old money that roots itself into a city and doesn’t let go easily. You’ll get a sense of what this part of town feels like if you can imagine lunching ladies dining at beautiful high-end restaurants that are interspersed with the kind of requisite Portland funk that one expects to see there.

I ended up shooting a handful of frames and deemed only one or two as meriting any value. Maybe the fault is mine. It could be that I’m in a creative rut. But my eye just wasn’t seeing that much.

As I write this, I am realizing now that I perhaps set myself up for the kind of wryness I seem to be expressing here. After all, I did gravitate to many of the fashionable and expensive hotspots in Portland. I must also confess that my current feelings about Portland probably find their root in the fact that much of the Portland I knew fifteen or twenty years ago no longer exists.

Or I could just be getting old and cranky.

On this most recent visit, I only had a day to take in as much as I could. I didn’t feel like I had the chance to spend time looking around for the little nooks and crannies that often make for more interesting street photography. I should probably make more of an effort to do that on my next trip there—and there will be a next trip, I’m sure.

Anyway, my last stop was Powell’s Books. No visit to Portland would be complete without a stop there. Of all the A-list attractions in that town, I’m happy to say that Powell’s has changed the least. Everything there—the smells, the shelving, the signage, the overwhelming selection of books, even the bathrooms—almost seem to be frozen in time and all in a good way. There is something quite remarkable about this Portland institution, and I’m super glad to see that it has survived all the tumult the city has gone through especially in recent years.

I ended up shooting two rolls of Kodak Tri-X during my one-day jaunt around town. They were only my fifth and sixth rolls I’ve ever shot of that film stock. As I scanned my negatives, I began to doubt whether Tri-X is for me. I found myself seeing temperamental behavior especially with subject matter in bright afternoon sunlight, where things can get a little crunchy. Shadow detail can appear on the dark side, too.

But after I finished my scanning work and had more of an evaluative look at my favorites on my iPad, I found myself liking that classic, gritty, higher-contrast black and white film look that Tri-X offers in spades. It might ask you to do a bit of work to get to a final image, but the results are worth it.