Category Archives: Oakland
Outdoor Plumbing
There is a bit of history regarding this photo. Photo was taken in July of 1970, using film and decades later, scanned into PC.
Location: East Oakland, CA. A friend had recently remodeled her bathroom and the remnants of the old bathroom ended up in her backyard. She lived on Oak Knoll Rd., a few blocks from the Oakland Zoo. Across the street from her lived Sonny Barger, the head of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. An interesting neighborhood!
Had to crank up the “Way Back Machine” for this one :-).
Junk as Art or Entropy or Dark Forces?
I posted these three images on my Instagram account late last night. After high school graduation I slipped away to spend some time with a friend who lived in East Oakland, CA. She had just finished remodeling her bathroom and so had left this pile of debris at the back of her yard. East Oakland was a very sketchy even dangerous place in 1970 ( but that is for another story). She hung bricks from her lemon tree and to me it was either just odd or perhaps even darker than odd: why would someone hang old, red bricks from a seemingly healthy lemon tree? My youthful imagination went into overdrive imagining all sorts of dark rituals or beliefs at work here. In reality, I suppose there was a very practical reason for the hanging bricks, but is sure looked odd.
Anyway, the images were old prints that I scanned into a PC last night. I think they were taken on my Agfa 35mm camera, but, 45 years later, I’m not sure.
