Catch of the day

Tools, grease, buckets, body parts framed by the escalator all counterpoint the nonchalance of the couple arriving on the up escalator. Today my photo assignment was to wait for a photo that wanted to be taken. This was it.

Figure Ground relationship

Seen from the skyway level, this woman looking at red crysanthemums is the figure against the backdrop of the grand scale USBank atrium. But she is wedged by perspective between the great wing of granite and the glass wall of the flower store. I take a lot of photos with small figures within large spaces. As I get older the spaces become more complex, contain more story elements. I started with a minimalist love of smooth empty space, but my vision, like my heart, becomes more cluttered with time.

The skyway as reflecting pool

In US Bank skyway skyway level promenade, the polished stone floor reflects the movement of bodies against and with the light. The building atrium has become, with four skyway connections, a crossroads. In the left upper third of the photo you can see the granite chevron suspended above the atrium ground level on thin wires.

Buildings as pretty things

Downtown, there are a lot of interesting surfaces and reflections, glass and stone conversing in the language of rippled symmetry.

Full emptyness

In the middle of the daytime weekday downtown scene. Minneapolis as a frame in a zen parable about the hunting of the bull.

American Idyll - lunch as performance art

Increasingly, in the city, you are on display. These women eat their lunch in a display window, like mannikens promoting the baguettes and soup of the luncheonette. They have become desensitized to the fact of their display, and carry on unselfconsciously while the lighting, framing, public-facing context of their lunch turns it into a theatrical performance for the passers-by. What if bystanders were encouraged to vote for their favorite window lunch performance?

The GetU! chapel idea was born here.

Coming to life in the skyway coffee shop. A scene repeated in dozens of locations around the grid.
I believe someone will soon create stations where patrons can show up, mumble incantatory strings of nonsense words, pay $5, and wait in silent reverie for their personal mantras to be repeated back to them. They will approach the priest/ess, who will hand them a small circle of paper with an x marked on it. They will nod, take the paper, touch it with their lips and throw it in the receptacle near the door on their way out. The stations will be marketed as healthy morning ritual chapels, a no-fat, caffeine free way to escape the buzzing cacaphony of the office and refocus your identity for a morning break. The first GetU! chapels will appear in Seattle, and will spread like wildfire.

Empty Fullness

What other city in the world can show you this emptiness during the middle of a business day?

A bit of underworld in the sky

Occaisionally you have to pass through the underworld between skyways. This stretch of yellow-stanchioned concrete runs through the city parking ramp near the Government Center. If we have learned anything from myths about the underworld, it is: don't look back. When Orpheus looked back to see if Eurydice was following him, he lost her forever.

Flowing in places others disdain

Lao Tzu, Chapter 8: "The best of man is like water,

Which benefits all things, and does not contend with them,
Which flows in places that others disdain,
Where it is in harmony with the Way."
The repairman benefits the skyway, and is in harmony.

I am a camera

Full disclosure: that's me.

The law, the witness, the distance.

From the skyways, you can bear witness. You have a better view of incidents, but are not likely to become involved, or asked to provide testimony. It is a bird's vantage and a ghosts' prerogatives you enjoy, up in the sky.

Skirting the gender issue of dress

Man with kilts in Capella Tower. Can you guess it's St. Patrick's Day? Why would you?

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

In late February, the atoms of civilization move toward the light. A bus is coming. A sparse crowd will surge and compress into the lurching warmth of the bus. The days get longer. The people age, and leave little trace behind.

Programming public solitude

In many of the skyways you can go long distances without encountering another person. The good thing about this is that no one is programming the spaces to be inhabited all the time. The bad thing is the same as the good thing.

Catastrophic gestures tamed by absence

This John Chamberlain sculpture is perched in a nook of the Capella tower. The cartoonish surface treatment and violence residual in the twisted metal clamors for attention in the buttoned-down spaces. But there is no one there to attend. If a sculpture shrieked in an empty skyway, did anything really happen?

The art of business spaces

There was always supposed to be art galleries in the skyway. That was the plan. I have only noticed two in the last few months...this one, which seems to be unattended, and another frame shop with some prints for sale. I would guess then that people who buy art, do not inhabit the skyways on a regular basis. Or they don't look for art to purchase there.

Old Glory

The Hennepin County Government Center Public Service Level -- skyway level. It was skywayed into the Pillsbury Center (now US Bank) on Sept. 17th, 1983, and now is encircled by skyways running northeast and southeast, making it a hub instead of an outpost in the system. The building opened in '75.  That is good advance planning.

Spoonbridge cheer. Major League hopes.

The giant eggbeaters on this plaza invite comparison to Oldenburg's famous Spoon Bridge and Cherry. The scene looks like a set for a sci-fi movie that is determined to defy the BladeRunner dystopian cliches of the future, and restore a kind of giganticized domestic cheer, very Scandinavian. Very Ikea.
This is the East Plaza of the Target Field, in the vicinity of the ticket booths, and I am standing just outside the skyway that runs for blocks along Second Avenue North. I have stepped out a rare door in a skyway to take the photo. It might be the only skyway with a door in it in addition to the openings at either end.

One loooong skyway

Second Avenue North skyway between the 5th and 7th Street Garages. The area around the Target Center and the new Target Field increasingly flaunts the architecture of bright color and sassy geometry, as though the gods of design themselves could lift the history-sodden spirits of the west downtown district.

Figure in the skyscape

One of my early photo teachers, Jerry Liebling, said that fear was a primary motive in photography -- fear of loss, fear of revelation, fear of banishment or meaninglessness. I walked past this hoodie-wearing person staring fixedly at the new Twins Stadium, and had to retrace my steps to take this shot. I knew the subject was some kind of fear, maybe mine, maybe yours.
Not incidentally, this is one of the few skyways that encourage you to sit and stare, however fixedly, at anything.

Aliens. Joy.

Some buildings on the skyway have provided seating and amenities such as these scarlet bromeliads -- tropical immigrants brushing wanton color against the dun and ashen schemes of Minneapolis interiors.

Look this way and that

Click to enlarge this, or just squint, and you can see the watery light of February reflected multiple ways, variations on the theme of glass and sunshine. If you look too long, the charm gives way to the realization of a closed prospect, a faceted but opaque stone city. Turn away while the ripples of incident light still play across your mind.

Block upon block of blocks upon blocks.

The mask of order hewn in stone, disguising the ornate chaos of the human soul.

There is a lion in this photo

Look for the king of beasts in this photo. There are many gate demon/guardian spirits downtown lending their powers to the skyways.