The Annotated Urban Landscape

For the past few weeks, I’ve been so busy building my photo walks, workshops, and teaching business that my own wandering with a camera has taken a back seat. Between planning walks, leading them, teaching classes, researching Neo-Formalist architecture, writing an article on the architecture of the College of San Mateo, and developing a walking tour to accompany it, the kind of aimless photography I love most has been rare.

Two weeks ago, just after a rainstorm, I finally slipped out for a walk.

A new subject revealed itself almost immediately.

I’m calling it The Annotated Urban Landscape.

Cities are covered with markings that were never meant for the average passerby. They’re messages written for utility workers, inspectors, contractors, and city crews. Once you start noticing them, they appear everywhere.

Numbers on a light pole identifying its location. Inspection tags stapled to telephone poles. Spray-painted arrows pointing to buried cables. Manhole covers labeled by the agency that installed them. Faded curb paint from long-forgotten parking regulations.

Sometimes the markings are fresh and clear, other times they’re weathered, layered, half-erased, and cryptic. They document the hidden systems that make our built environment function.

This fits perfectly into the kind of photographs I’m drawn to: the passed-by, the under-appreciated, and the not-noticed.

What struck me on this walk was how photographic these small details can be. The textures, the colors against concrete and metal, the odd typography, the traces of time and weather. They’re fragments of a larger story written across the city.

The images here are just a first pass—more like field notes than a finished project. But the idea stuck with me. I suspect this could become something worth pursuing.

From now on, I’ll be keeping my eyes open for the city’s annotations and attempting to figure out how to make them into interesting photographs.

Have you photographed the bits and pieces that make up our urban environments? I’d love to hear about your experiences or hear your thoughts on this subject.

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