Harps – Many Stories in One Shot

Given the worn-out shadow of a biohazard logo on the box, I believe it is clear that the red box isn’t being used for disposing of broken musical instruments.

Cambridge is one of the safest, most well educated, and richest cities in America. Home to Harvard and MIT, birthplace of the Apollo moon landings, and the “most innovative square mile on the planet”. Yet even this place, is not safe from the specter of the fentanyl epidemic in America. And in the rather self-explanatory Central Square, one of the few districts that isn’t devoted to education or research, it is most visibly seen.

Here, the city government thought that, if they couldn’t stop people from using narcotics, then at least they could try to make them not harm others through littering or sharing used needles. Out of sight, out of mind. Judging by how often I’ve seen these discarded needles just laying around, only a couple of minutes away from the box, I question its effectiveness. Though, perhaps it would have been worse if they hadn’t installed it, I have no way of truly knowing. So, here it sits among the garbage, battered by seasons and salt and sad stories too many to count.

Yet in the midst of all this gloom, there is a message of hope, from the similarly colored electrical transformer. Hope for the people who find themselves at this box, for the drug crisis, and for a better future for every human. A hope that this box will decay among the garbage out of lack of need, not lack of care. And I choose to believe in this hope as well. I wonder who the artist that painted the origami crane was?

Something I noticed when taking this photo, is that I’ve only now done so. I used to work in a biotech site just a couple of blocks away for years, and I passed by it frequently, but it took me this long to come here with a camera. Long after I started working elsewhere, and just came down to the Square on a day off to test a lens. When we’re exposed to something frequently, we grow accustomed to it always being present, not valuing it, forgetting about it if you will.

Now, here I was after remembering it, trying to stuff all the stories about this box, into this single shot.

But I will give an exception to this lens; in the Contax world, it is a legend, and it didn’t take long to see why. Contrast and color rendition is spectacular, and it gives that beautiful Sonnar look/3D effect in spades. I love all the Sonnar lenses in the Contax system for this reason, and I’m glad that this lens is a worthy contender among its peers. It makes me want to take it out more often, which I didn’t expect when I first got it; I mostly use it as a combined 35 and 70 mm prime though and rarely use the intermediate lengths.

ORWO NC400 is one of my favorite film stocks. I think the grain & coldness of this film is a love-or-hate-it thing, but I personally love it, especially for urban shots. It has a nice grit to it, and I really love how vividly reds render on it, which is particularly why I wanted to photograph this scene with it. Plus, the coldness matches the feeling of winter well. My personal preference is to shoot it at EI 200 and develop in ECN-2, which is what I’ve done here albeit developed by my local lab.

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