Sarasota, Gas Station
“If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”
— Edward Hopper
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Helen Levitt, the famous street photographer said something similar, “Since I’m inarticulate, I take photographs.”
Both Hopper and Levitt are storytellers. The former tells stories with painting, the latter with photography. In these blogs, I tell stories with writing. For millennia, stories have been an integral part of the human condition. Photography is a very recent addition to this tradition.
Though he denied it, Hopper’s narratives tend to focus on emptiness, solitariness, alienation, loneliness, perhaps depression. There is a lot that is unspoken and mysterious in his work, leaving the viewer to guess the circumstances of the story.
I took this photo on highway 41 in Sarasota, a mile from our home, inspired by Hopper’s famous 1940 painting Gas in which a lone figure, perhaps a manager, is shutting down for the night, a gas station along a lonely country road. In both our works, red is the dominant color, trees create a background. there is strong, harsh artificial light which contrasts with the subtle colors of the incoming darkness of sunset.
We humans fear the dark, so we create harsh, bright, artificial light to push back, keeping the darkness at bay. In my photograph, as in Hopper’s painting, the darkness is in fact a fascinating spectrum of colors, more beautiful than frightening.
The silver Prius on the right, was my car at the time. It’s over 80 years since Hopper did his painting. Gas stations and cars have changed tremendously during this time. The human condition, however, seems hardly to have changed at all.
