Hitt and Locust

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
2011

This is an image that performs better when you don’t enlarge it. I have tried to view this photo as a large image that fills the screen, and as a tiny image that occupies only a thumbnail of space. And its sweet spot is somewhere in between. To enlarge it is to lose the fantastic magic that is the snow falling across this nearly deserted intersection of two downtown Columbia streets…Hitt, moving traffic and pedestrians north and south, and Locust, funneling the same foot and vehicle traffic east and west. Somewhere between too small and too large is the perfect size for this photograph, a size that preserves the detail of each flake of snow as it crosses the path of the streetlight, a size that allows the viewer to distinguish the poise and purpose of the walker’s arm as he trudges confidently southward, and a size that does not attempt to exploit the magic of a scene that could be taken from a children’s fantasy book, or an upended snow globe, or a Russian novel. Keep this image small when you view it. This is also an image to which, I must confess I find it difficult to confidently ascribe a date. Was this taken in 2002, or in 2011? Was I standing on the corner of this parking garage in a snowfall with a film camera or with a digital camera? This particular vantage point was one of my early and favorite locations from which to photograph downtown Columbia, and my first roll of night photography slide film included an image taken here in 1996, when University Market occupied the southeast corner, and Bambino’s and International Café were on the opposite side of Hitt. This photograph is less about the buildings and businesses that occupy these corners, and it is much more about the emptiness of the scene, the softness and quiet rendered by a nocturnal snowfall, and the lone, striding figure, bringing movement and meaning to an otherwise uninhabited composition.