One of the rarest gifts in the life of an artist is finding a creative muse: someone who truly sees your work, and better yet, has a similar vision that is just enough different that you can collaborate without competing. In the often solitary studio life these connections can be difficult to find, but during pandemic, Instagram brought a new creative companion into my life. I do not know who started following who first. But in May 2020 I found myself sharing instant messages with a photographer working under the name “Concrete spaces“— a handle that immediately piqued my interest. Concrete has been one of my obsessions for years. Miraculously, there was someone out there who understood why I was working on a book called Parking Lot Floors Of North America.
In the cesspool of political conspiracies and rage-posting that drove social media during pandemic, my connection with this stranger was a lifeline. I would find myself at midnight, sharing notes with him about photographic inspirations, cameras, paper, printers, and the places we loved to wander with a camera. As it is when someone becomes a muse, I found myself wondering what he was seeing at any given moment. One night on a sunset walk in my neighborhood I photographed the full moon and sent him a text. He was on a railroad track in SODO photographing the same moon from a tripod on the top of his car. Over time we began to hold each other to account in our work. Over the many months we wrote before we met, my invisible friend’s silence to some of my images would tell me they were dangerously romantic or sentimental, and my silence back to his might make him wonder, did I see something here or is it just too random, not just bleak, but empty of meaning?
Scott Wippermann and I are certainly not the first two people to fall in love with the edge zones or the beauty of bleakness, and that territory can be treacherous. Is it opportunistic to document the detritus of other people’s lives and broken places? Is it heartless to look at ruins— whether of a person or of a building as pure abstraction? When is photography of society’s failures and abandonments “art“ and when is it exploitation, or simply journalism with a shorter caption?
None of those questions get answered very well by talking about them. What I found in my friendship with Scott was someone willing to take the risky pictures and learn in the process of taking them where the answers lie. We instant messaged each other for over a year before we ever met in person for what we both antcicipated could be a mythic photo shoot. In May of 2021, the moment arrived, and Scott invited me to join him and Pearls, his irresistible German shorthaired pointer, to scout the back roads of SODO.
I love to photograph these areas, but in the early 2020s they had become feral, filled with encampments of people living on a predatory edge, and our police force had gone missing. Getting to the river or Harbour Island required freeway off ramps, merges and exits and split moment decisions surrounded by fast moving trucks that terrified me. Until my mid 30s, I navigated entirely by three speed bicycle and bus, and coming late to driving, I have never felt confident. Scott, on the other hand, was a man with gear, and an adventure travel vehicle with wheels that could elevate, leap unexpected gaps in a washed out highway and land with aplomb. He had been an extreme athlete, survived countless broken bones, and seemed to have no fear at all. I was in awe, happy to park my Toyota Corolla 88 FX hatchback and hand the driving to him.
I knew we were going to be fast friends when we turned onto Occidental and spotted an abandoned office chair, tilting backwards on a broken wheel and gleaming with silver duct tape. We both saw it at exactly the same moment, stopped the car, got out and photographed it from every angle. The air was glorious and crisp with early spring, and the sky blazed blue over Ashgrove Cement. We raced the dog up ramps to nowhere in the tangled, angular shadows of industry. Golden light spilled across pitted brick and the vast expanse of empty parking lots. At the magic hour, the perfectly white tanks of toxic chemicals on Harbour Island never looked so purely alabaster.
A few weeks later we went out into the dry docks in kayaks, and I am still astonished by our captures of the ships, shrouded, undressed, distressed and partway to repair. Is there any ornament of a ship as elegant as an anchor?
One morning Scott asked if I would like to go on a road trip to Yakima, usually a place he described as solitary pilgrimage. I expected we would chase church steeples and clouds and eat bad food: I had no idea that when Scott said “roadtrip” he meant would I like to go off the road and onto territory unmarked by anything but the tracks of mountain bikes and horses. To this day I have no idea where the map might say we were. All I know is that at the top of a terrifying incline, which required every Mad Max effect of Scott’s car, we reached some kind of infinity. The clouds were in agreement with everything, as long as we had the patience to wait for a minor shift in alignment. And Pearls was delirious.
Our most recent road trip required getting up at an absurd hour. Like, 5 AM — to reach the Satsop nuclear plant in time to see the sun rise. We just missed the sun, but got the depth of field provided by fog and a dense brooding light appropriate to the subject (hello 3-Mile Island. . .). I had never realized how much a nuclear cooling plant and a Victorian Bodice have in common.
Satsop was a carnival of ruin, one vista after another filled with grandiose monument and inimitable decay. After the excitement, a long meditative drive through the mist-soaked fields of southwest Washington was very welcome. Later, in the unobstructed sunlight of afternoon, we walked the hills and boardwalks of Astoria. The name “Astoria,” if traced back to the Greek, means “place of the hawk.” Which I translate to mean the birds’ eye view of time and space. Do you ever have dreams of places you have never been but know you have lived in for a lifetime? The great hill in Astoria is one of those places for me, and I walked into a dream I have had since I was 4 or 5, a landscape so certain I know it was my home, though we never found the swing set, or the sprawling Victorian house, with all the women in white aprons and silver combs in their hair.
We spent the last of our light in the Golden Hour under the freeways in Aberdeen, dodging the mangled shopping carts and blue smoke of the lotus eaters. Nothing says Happy Hour like the light coming off the Pacific, turning gray into gold. This is the alchemy of concrete spaces.
The above stories are just a glimpse of the hundreds photographs I have taken on the road with Scott. Yesterday, with his encouragement, I upgraded my gear to a Sony a7CR to create larger prints, after seeing a 30-inch landscape from his Leica — !! and hope we will find time this fall to wander again. I am counting on his expertise, after shooting too much with my phone, for remembering f-stops, aperture and how to hold perfectly still.
You can reach Scott Wippermann at his new enterprise, Eastlake Photo, where he specializes in fine-art printing, artwork reproduction, DSLR film scanning, and archival giclée printing. For a look at his luscious noir series, see my review of his 2025 show at the Labour Temple here. Opening this October 9th at Slip Gallery you can see the work of Scott, myself and 6 other photographers in Intimate Structures, opening at Slip Gallery October 9th.
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