Troy Riverfront
cjonthehudson
It’s the bicycle.
In 1910, the city of Troy, New York had a population of over 75,000. It was a bustling industrial city, home to iron foundries and steel mills, a center for manufacturing shirts, shirtwaists, collars and cuffs. But the steel and iron industries moved to Pennsylvania and eventually overseas, and most shirts today are manufactured in Asia. Today the population of Troy is around 50,000.
The cityscape looks abandoned, derelict, neglected. Everybody is gone. Or so it seems. But there’s the bicycle. The bicycle stands in for the people NOT in the frame. The bicycle leaning against the tree is evidence of the implied person. Without the bicycle, this would just be a photograph of empty buildings. With the bicycle, it’s a photograph of social loss, of cultural and economic change, of lives turned upside down.
What we see here, through the existence of the bicycle, is the presence of an absence.
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
