AS I’VE PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN, I’m working on a coffee-table picture book about my town (tentatively titled City Light). I hope to get it out in September, coinciding with Seattle’s 150th birthday. I’ll be writing the text (short, pithy odes to my favorite local neighborhoods, places, people, and historical tales). I’m also taking some of the pix, with one of them newfangled digital camera thangs.
But for the book’s big showcase photos, I’m grateful to be working with a great photographer and local native named Lori Lynn Mason. She creates huge 4-by-6-inch color shots, mini-masterpieces of light and color. But even more importantly, she shares my love of Seattle and concern for its accelerating changes.
We’ve been on three or four shooting sessions thus far, assembling a sample chapter on Aurora Avenue (the spine of old Seattle’s heart and soul) to show to prospective publishers or investors. (Color photo books cost a bit more to print than the two monochrome, text-based volumes MISCmedia has published to date.)
As you can tell from these shots (including the above, shot during a 29 Live cablecast at the public access studios), it’s going to be vastly different document from the tourist-oriented Seattle photo books you may know. It’ll be about people of all stripes living, working, playing, and creating around here. It’ll celebrate the ideas, the spirit, and the ambitions of our formerly-fair city.
My only regret is I didn’t start on it sooner.
Not only because we’re on tight deadlines to get this out by September, but because darn near every week a valuable piece of the city’s heritage goes away (such as the Pioneer Square pergola, destroyed inadvertantly by a semi truck earlier this month.)
NEXT: What we know about the new Administration after a week.
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