Short Street Pavers
Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
2013
Of the many things we take for granted, some are just beneath our feet. These are the well-worn pavers of Short Street, a downtown Columbia street whose original path now lies beneath a hotel and a parking garage. In 2009, I came back to photographing downtown Columbia, after a hiatus. New construction was springing up and rapidly changing the skyline and the footprint of the town I had called home since the mid-90s. My photography work during the late 90s and early 2000s had been an artistic and visual exploration of the downtown area, but in 2009 I was motivated by a desire to document the community I had known for 15 years.
My approach to night photography became more methodical and more literal. Except for the occasional image like this…a portrait of a group mist-bedecked pavers on a cold night, taken just a few months before development began on the Short Street Parking Garage and expansion of the adjacent hotel. According to some fairly reliable sources, these pavers were saved before development began on this site and were taken to a city storage facility for possible future use in a downtown street project.