All black. Reed beds and a curtain of falling water.
Parkside is a third stop on the same Birmingham trip as Garden Meditation and Reflections of the Past - seventeen frames at Railroad Park, the 19-acre downtown greenspace run by the Railroad Park Foundation, shot on a hard, low-sun afternoon with the pond reeds gone to rust. One all-black rig runs the whole shoot: black tee, heavy silver cuban chain, strapped tactical cargo pants, black boots.
The first half walks the pond ledge - cattails and still green water filling the frame, a mid-rise apartment block on the far bank, his shadow thrown long across the pale concrete. Flat, bright, unhurried.
The second half is the part that stays with you. Under the Rail Trail Bridge, Railroad Park's 80-foot rain curtain pours off the deck edge in unbroken vertical strands over an ivy-covered embankment, and he stands dead still inside it - an arm raised in front of him, then head down, then arms folded, the water falling between him and the lens the whole time.
The rain curtain is a built feature, not a stormwater accident - an engineered waterfall meant to oxygenate the park's lake, backlit with slow-rotating LEDs after dark. Parkside photographs it like a set anyway, the same instinct that sent the trip to a Japanese garden and a museum staircase elsewhere in Birmingham.
What "Parkside" means
Parkside is an address that never quite arrives - the edge of the park, the side of the water, the underside of the bridge. The shoot spends its whole length at thresholds: the rim of the pond, the lip of the falls, the line where the falling water starts. In the wolf's scripture the VOID "opened its maw and promised to consume all," and an engineered curtain built to pour off a bridge deck without ever running dry is that on a small scale - something designed to keep falling, permanently, whether or not anyone stands underneath. Standing still under it anyway, in a rig cut for exactly this, is the answer the catalogue keeps giving: let it fall, don't move.
SEE ALL 17 PHOTOS FROM THE SHOOT HERE
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