stairway to nowhere

[DanK]

Stuck mostly inside after a bad storm--ice everywhere--I decided to go through some old photos that I hadn't fussed with at the time. This one I had to focus stack, but then I left it, uncertain whether there is any there there. Today I decided to give it an edit and see. It has a lot more detail now, but I'm still not sure there is enough there. Frank comments welcome as always.

[The amateur]

Dan, the first thing I did when I saw this image was try to understand it. A staircase ? Where is it ? A mystery…

The lighting spots on the left and, above all, the patches of sunlight projected onto what appears to be the right-hand wall gave me enough clues to realise that the image had been rotated counterclockwise.

Once rotated back to its correct position, the spatial perception becomes perfectly clear. I even tilted my head from side to side, trying to make sense of it, until…

What are all those bowls, intentionally scattered yet neatly arranged ? Do they contain candles ? What a mystery…

It’s also intriguing how the idea of a staircase serves as the initial impulse for interpreting the image.

[DanK]

Antonio,

Very observant! Yes, this is a hallway in "Mass MOCA", the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which is in terms of physical space the largest modern art museum in North America (and maybe anywhere). It is in many previously abandoned brill factory buildings in North Adams MA. The bowls on the right of the photo are an installation on the floor. I've spent time wandering through the buildings looking for interesting images, but I haven't actually gotten many.

I did post one other here years ago from an earlier visit, before you started to visit this forum. It's from their old power building:



Dan

[The amateur]

Dan, thank you for commenting back.

I once had the opportunity to photograph a factory where cork was processed. It was around 1974 or 1975 (I'm not sure though) when this factory was nationalised following the events of 25 April 1974.
Later, it was abandoned, and only many years afterward did I manage to enter it.
I remember that it still smelled of cork, which had been cooked and transformed there.

Your last photo brought that memory back to me.
The image you present seems to capture the essence of a past industrial era, now aged by time.

Do you have more ?
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But outside of this thread just one detail: I have belonged to this forum since May 2008 as Antonio Correia. Later, following a temporary absence, I ended up not being able to recover the original account and had to create another, this one.

[DanK]

I have one more that I posted here before, which I'll paste here. I have a number of others that I'm not sure I'm willing to share, but I will work on them a little more.