“Gas” Station on Hitt and Locust

“Gas” Station on Hitt and Locust

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
2011

Gas is in quotation marks because, in my nearly 30 years in Columbia, there has never been gas here, although it was clearly at one time a gas station, with gas.  Now it is colloquially known as the “No Gas” Station, and it seems to do pretty well for itself, supplying its customers with both essentials and non-essentials, the latter comprising an apparently thriving trade.  This photo was taken on one of those extremely snowy nights during the winter of 2011, and the image was made from a location only a stone’s throw from where I took last week’s posted image.  As I might have mentioned in last week’s post, or I should have if I didn’t, I don’t often have humans showing up in my night photographs.  Night photography for me is focused on the place, the street, the structure, the edifice…not necessarily the overlaid human activity.  When I photograph a building or a location at night, I am often trying to distill some kind of structural essence of that building or of that location.  But with any approach, there are often useful reasons for breaking a rule.  Sometimes the person walking through the scene adds context or meaning to the scene, and sometimes they become the reason for the final image.  As I believe happened with this image, on that snowy night in 2011, on the corner of Hitt and Locust.