dude, what's up with the lift?
Over the years I’ve found myself in many different buildings, usually in the evening, ensuring mid-level executive types can politely confirm orders over the telephone and hold their own in post negotiation scenarios, such as when the deal is done and everyone heads for the bar. And that’s not to mock the perfunctory – smalltalk is king and the smoother it is the better. It gets you what you want. But anyway…
These gigs are usually in the metropolitan sprawl, often in a business district, in good looking, high-sided streets.There’ll be an address that begins with the nearest metro station and from there I’ll find my way.
Sometimes though, the client will be located in a more modest setting. Not every lesson takes place on the 38F with a killer view of Tokyo Bay. It can be just a couple of stories up. There’s this one outfit, an auto-supplies maker, I’ve been involved with for a while. They’re great people, polite, enjoy a joke and are easygoing, too, (and apart from a better hourly rate and more attractive students, that’s all you want). We spend two hours together once a week in a small meeting room. In the beginning, when the class had ended, I was walked back down to the reception and thanked profusely. Now I am only thanked profusely. These days I’m accompanied as far as the lift. It’s a system that helps them and suits me. They get five bonus minutes and an extra cigarette break and I’m freer sooner. When I took the picture above, the wait was such that I decided to use the stairs, off to the side.
By and large I like stairs – assuming there’s not too many – it’s another place where quite familiar elements can arrange themselves in bold and even interesting ways. I concede that the stairwell pictured is no art deco milestone but it is something I enjoy looking at. It’s pleasing and with a neat appreciable balance between all its points. I have this idea, well, actually, it’s more of a feeling, that sometimes pictures work and there’s a rightness to them. Whereas some, for no obvious reason, don’t.
Took it using the LX3, f2, 1/30, ISO400, dynamic B&W, 16:9 ratio
TT
an interesting take on an otherwise simply subject
and it does work…