Lisa Toboz
letter to my city
Okay, so you’re driving over the bridge–maybe thirty-five, forty miles an hour–and you point your camera out the window and take a picture. No big deal, right?
Wrong. Wrong, because when you take that picture everything stops. Everything stops. Everything stops. The car stops, the clouds stop moving because the wind has stopped blowing, the river stops flowing, the unseen fish in the river stop swimming, the invisible people in the city stop doing whatever they’re doing and just stand there. Every damned thing just stops. Time itself stops. It all just stops.
You could get out of the car and stand at the edge of the bridge and look down on the now-still Monongahela River which has been flowing since the Ice Age, like a hundred thousand years or something, and it’s stopped. The whole city of Pittsburgh, which has been trashing up the river since the late 1790s–stopped. History has stopped. Everything that ever happened on the crumbling banks of that river–all the steel manufactured, all the flatboats built, all the natives who hunted and fished, all the wooly mammoths and saber-toothed cats that roamed along the river–everything that ever happened leading up to this one moment of time, it’s all stopped. You clicked the shutter and you made Every Thing Stop.
That’s a big deal, right there.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
