The Artful Engineer

On one of our backroads drives in Alabama last August, we came upon an abandoned gas station. August in Alabama is hot and humid. So humid, in fact, that when I got out of the nicely air conditioned car my camera completely fogged up. (Want to avoid this problem? Keep your camera in the trunk where it is warmer!) Despite this, I managed to take the picture above, but the milky, low-contrast look of the photo is a result. I was able to process it so that it looked more “normal” than this, but decided to stick with this version anyway. The low contrast makes it feel a bit like an old, slightly-faded photograph, which fits the subject.

Once your camera is fogged over, all you can do is wait for it to warm up. With big hunks of glass, this can take a long time, so I didn’t really get anything else that day. But I did decide to come back on my next visit. As it happened, that was only a month later. Here the road and the overgrown sign tell a story: even without seeing the gas station itself, you know the world—and car after car—has passed it by.

The thing that really grabbed my attention about this gas station was the colorful roof over the pumps: between the remaining red paint, the rust, and the lichen, it was a striking combination of colors and textures. All of which are hard to emphasize when your camera is fogged over. On this next visit, I was able to show it clearly:

Here is one of the pumps. Rust, fading paint, peeling stickers, and encroaching plants all contribute to the old-and-abandoned feel. Compositionally, I like the curving swoosh of the black hose around the bottom of the pump, too.

I liked these rusty covers, especially the way the one on the left has stained the pavement but the one on the right hasn’t. Even so, I don’t like this image. I’m convinced that there is a better composition here. It’s not that I couldn’t find it, it’s more that I didn’t try: this is one of those situations where I liked the subject enough that I was lackadaisical about the composition and the result was bleh.

Can I talk my wife into going to an old creepy gas station a third time…?

Continuing our drive, we found a second abandoned gas station. I’m not sure what happened to undermine both of these businesses a few miles apart—maybe if one of them had folded earlier the other could have recovered, but in the end, neither did.

It’s remarkable how nature just wants to swallow everything in Alabama:

The exposed inner workings of this old-style pump are pretty interesting. Maybe the death-knell for these businesses was people starting to expect pay-at-the-pump. Perhaps fancy modern pumps were more than they could afford, and that was that.

I hope you enjoyed another backroads journey with Jim. Next week the blog returns to Europe and it will likely be some months before we return to North America.