Paris Road Laundromat
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO2002 Signed Prints Available This is the laundromat that once stood on the corner of Paris Road and Mt. Vernon, in northeast Columbia. I made this photograph in August or September of 2002, when this beautifully adorned structure on the corner of Paris and Mt. Vernon was officially decommissioned and closed. Like so…
Glenn’s Café
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO1999 In 1999 this neon sign advertising Glenn’s Café was still firmly attached to the southeast corner of the Ballenger Building on the corner of Ninth and Cherry. For some reason I wasn’t as fascinated by this sign as I was by the neon on the Peking restaurant, so I really don’t have…
Peking
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO1998 Signed Print Available This photograph is the image that I want to say the most about, and it has become the most challenging to write about. The Peking neon sign was a beacon and a waymarker on my nocturnal wanderings in downtown Columbia. The illumination provided by this beautiful sign guided my…
Missouri Theatre
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO2000 The Missouri Theatre was not something I photographed very often in the late 90s and early 2000s. The marquee was too bright at night, overwhelming my ability to capture any information in the darker areas of the negative. The wonderfully vintage theatre sign above the marquee was recessed in a dark…
KOPN
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO2011 Signed Print Available This photograph is as much about the weather as it is about the glow of the neon letters on the other side of Broadway. This was taken in January, during the magically snowy winter of 2011. This was the second or third in a series of snowstorms that eventually…
Short Street Pavers
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO2011 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…
Lowry Mall (1996)
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO1996 Signed Print Available During some of my very formative and creative years in Columbia, Lowry Mall was my backyard. I was taking art and photography classes in the art department at MU, and the brick-paved confines of this campus space had everything we needed…a bookstore well-supplied with art and photography supplies, the…
Heidelberg (2001)
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOJanuary, 2001 This photograph was taken some time between December 2000 and February 2001, while standing in the middle of Ninth Street with a Nikon film camera mounted on a tripod, with one eye on the composition, and my other eye watching for oncoming traffic. I had been waiting to discover the correct…
Shakespeare’s, Ninth and Elm
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MODecember, 1998 The wonderful thing about posting a photograph of a Columbia institution like Shakespeare’s is that I don’t feel the necessity of supplying an overwhelming amount of descriptive text. Everyone has their own memories of Shakespeare’s; everyone has Shakespeare’s stories and glowing recollections of past and current Shakespeare’s outings. This photograph was…
Osama’s Coffee Zone (1998)
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOMarch, 1998 This photograph was taken on the same snowy evening as the image of north Tenth Street that I posted here last week. On Sunday, March 8, 1998, Columbia experienced a particularly wet and heavy snowfall. I left the house with two film cameras and several rolls of black and white film,…
Osama’s In Snowfall
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOJanuary, 2011 In 2011 Columbia enjoyed a long and snowy winter. The snows that year started in mid-January, and lingered, with varying degrees of intensity, until April. This photograph was taken in late January outside Osama’s Coffee Zone, at 11 North Ninth Street, just as a winter storm was sinking its icy teeth…
Quinton’s on a Snowy Night, South Ninth Street
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO1998 Quinton’s on Ninth Street. I think I only patronized this establishment a rare handful of times…maybe twice. Not that I had any issues with Quinton’s, but it just wasn’t my kind of place. In 1998, when this photo was taken, my kind of place would have been The Heidelberg, Shakespeare’s, or Billiards. …
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Osama’s Coffee Zone, 11 North Ninth
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOJanuary, 2011 Once again, we find ourselves in the month of January 2011. This was an artistically productive month for me because I was between jobs, I had a bit of free time, and the weather was phenomenal. Winter had finally come to Columbia, and snowstorm followed snowstorm during the months of January…
Lucy’s Diner Interior
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOMay, 2009 Lucy’s Diner, on the corner of Sixth and Broadway, was an elusive structure to photograph at night. For some reason I have very few photos of the exterior, but I do have a photo of the interior. This image is an example of the well-known saying, less is more. Everything in…
View of 10th Street
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO2002/2003 or 2008/2009 I am posting this image today not just as a retrospective view of this corner of Tenth and Locust but also as a visual moment of peace after a very difficult week. I have posted photographic views of Tenth Street once or twice during this series, and chances are I…
Loop 70 Coin Laundry, West Business Loop and Garth
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO2014 What is it about a laundromat at night that captivates and inspires so many photographers? Brightly lit laundromats appear frequently in the photographs of nocturnal photographers, along with diners, gas stations, and anything adorned with neon. When I first moved to Columbia laundromats were plentiful…we had a laundromat next to Shakespeare’s on…
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Carpe Diem, 807 East Locust
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO2012 This small building at 807 East Locust has housed a variety of businesses since I first moved to Columbia in 1995. Now that I sit down to write about it, I struggle to remember them all. The first thing I remember here was a tattoo parlor, and later there was Carpe Diem. …
Ninth Street in Rain, South Ninth Street
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO1998 It is an effort to try and remember everything that was located on this beautiful stretch of Columbia’s Ninth Street in the late 1990s…this photograph helps. On the far left was Billiard’s, before it moved to Broadway…next was The Music Café, followed by the restaurant with my favorite neon sign ever to…
College Avenue Car Wash, Corner of College Avenue and Wilkes Boulevard
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MO——- This might be the first photo I have shown that was taken on Columbia’s College Avenue. The first house I rented in Columbia was located on College, albeit at the south end. The College Avenue Car Wash was located on the north end of College, a stretch that featured car repair shops,…
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Ewer’s Tire and Auto, 419 East Broadway
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOAugust, 2011 I took this photograph because I knew that someday this would change. I don’t have this type of intuition as often as I should, and I even less frequently follow up on it. There have been magnificent scenes in Columbia that I have not photographed and documented since I moved here…
Koonse Glass, 10th Street
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOSeptember, 2011 I was once asked by a Journalism student why I seemed to prefer taking night photos during inclement weather…especially snow. At the time, I intuitively knew how the weather affected my photography and my creativity, but I did not know how to answer the question. Taken in late September 2011, this…
815 Business Loop 70 East
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOJune, 2011 We are leaving the historic brick buildings and romanticized winter views of downtown Columbia and moving to the Business Loop this week and will be exploring a few structures up and down the loop during my next few posts. This decision was made in response to last week’s fire in one…
Office Depot, East Broadway
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOJanuary, 2011 This photograph was taken on a busy night for me, as any major snowstorm was a reason for me to be outside photographing Columbia. This also represents another documentation of a Columbia building or structure that has been developed or significantly changed since the photograph was made. In 2011 Office Depot…
Park’s International Market
Stephen BybeeColumbia, MOJune, 2011 Many of the images in the Nocturnal Visions exhibit at Columbia College were made twenty years ago or more, when I was taking photography classes at Columbia College and at MU. In between 2003 and 2009, I was living in a different city and pursuing a different path, but I eventually…