7 Days, 7 Photos on Facebook

Earlier this month, a friend handed off a Facebook challenge to me. It read:

I’ve been challenged.
Day __ of __ -- seven days, seven photos of your everyday life. No people, no comments, and tag someone to join in each day.

I had mixed feelings about this. I had seen my buddy going through this exercise on his page: he’s a stage and voice actor based in the Seattle area I had “met” online in a Harlan Ellison fan group on Usenet ’way back in the mid 1990s when he lived in Albuquerque. We’ve met in person several times since, both in Seattle and Portland. It crossed my mind that he might tap me to do this too.

My suspicion was that, like so many other tag-a-friend activities on Facebook over the years, this one had originated as the bright idea of some faceless staffer at Facebook corporate HQ in Menlo Park, California. These pretend to be spontaneous, grassroots ideas that just plain folks came up with to do with their friends for fun, but that probably wasn’t the initial impetus.

The goal is to drive up clicks, shares, and activity in general, so Facebook’s gross traffic numbers continue to climb and the social media giant can charge advertisers more money because (in theory) more eyes are encountering their ads.

If you’ve been active on Facebook a while, you’ve seen a lot of these. Back in 2009 and 2010, it was lists:

15 Albums

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what albums my friends choose. To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note.

I remember similar come-ons to do a list of “15 Authors (poets, journalists, bloggers, and any other genre included)” . . . “25 Songs” from your mp3 player, iTunes collection, or CDs . . . and “50 Musical Acts, 50 Concerts” -- always with the tell-tale phrase “that will always stick with you” and ALWAYS with the “rule” to “tag at least 15 friends” (and sometimes 25).

I’m not excited to do something when I know its purpose is to make money for other people I don’t know or care about. I sure as hell wasn’t going to tag anybody to join in, because, as I told the friend who had tagged me: “I don’t like to obligate anyone to anything; people should be free to do whatever they choose.” He said that was fine with him.

But I was interested in the exercise of shooting photos from my daily life with no people or comment. Despite the technological aspect, the “7 days, 7 photos” assignment would encourage you to look around, think about your surroundings, and notice the beauty or distinctiveness of the ordinary and everyday.

Although you’d have to fiddle with digital gear and demand that faraway friends notice you in yet another online exercise, at least for part of the process you’d be “in the moment” of your life. It could be a form of high-tech prayer or meditation.

This would be more of a hassle for me than most; I’m sure everyone else was shooting their photos with a mobile phone and posting them instantly to their FB page. I, on the other hand, never use my mobile to shoot photos, read email, or surf the web; I don’t know how and don’t care to learn. I just make and receive a few calls and texts, mostly with my wife and only occasionally with a client, supervisor, family member, or friend.

So I would have to shoot the photos with a digital camera, bring them home and download them off the camera into my wife’s laptop (because for some reason, my latest OS download no longer allows me to retrieve photos from the camera into my MacBook Pro, though it used to), transfer the digital photo docs by thumb drive over to my laptop, and finally upload them to Facebook.

My first shot (Oct. 11, see above) shows what was right in front of me when my Seattle friend tapped me: my desk, laptop, and a gorgeous composite digital photo on metal (coated aluminum) of downtown Portland and Mt. Hood at daybreak, by Hillsboro photographer Tad Hetu.

This is where I do my wordsmithing most days, whether editing and proofreading for web clients like Sesame Communications and AudienceBloom (for both of whom I’ve freelanced more than five years), my own blogging and creative writing, or catching up with email and gabbing on social media. It’s where I’m sitting as I type this.

Once I’d posted my first shot, I learned from other friends that the exercise was supposed to consist of black-and-white photos, but that hadn’t been part of my instructions. It would also have been even more work, since I don’t know how to convert color images to b&w.

I was pretty sure day 2 (Oct. 12) would be something from the Central Branch of the Multnomah County Library. For ten years, Carole and I lived just three blocks from the library, so I swung by there almost every day.

Now I have to ride the streetcar a mile or two from our South Waterfront apartment, so I probably drop in only three or four times a week, on average, to feed my 150-books-a-year reading habit. The photo above is a closeup of the etched marble stairway from the first to the second floors.

Day 3 (Oct. 13) is a closeup of my notes for the survey I did earlier this month of businesses along the 7.2 miles of Portland Streetcar alignments. I walked several multiples of that distance between Sept 30 and Oct. 15 to cover all the territory.

The printout in the photo consists of an Excel spreadsheet of the results from the first time I did the survey, last December; the ink markings are my notes this time around, ten months later. A lot had changed (businesses closed, new ones opened, old ones rebranded), and we expanded the survey area to include a block on each either of the rail lines, plus the businesses that face the street one block out.

Next (Oct. 14) is a shot of Carole’s hands reaching for one of my favorite vegetables at the Farmers Market held nearly every Saturday year round on the campus of Portland State University. We’re there most Saturday mornings to shop for meals in the coming week. I took more brilliant and startling photos of purple, green, yellow, and red bell peppers, pumpkins, and mouthwatering Pearl Bakery demi-baguettes on Day 4, but in the end I felt it was best to feature something we actually purchased and ate.

On Sunday (Oct. 15) we walked the dog over to the South Waterfront Greenway, a strip of urban park along the Willamette River that opened right about the time we moved into the neighborhood in September 2015. The Day 5 photo depicts a portion of one of those odd environmental sculptures that have become popular in recent years: they incorporate organic elements (in this case, an uprooted tree), so they transform subtly but steadily with the passage of time.

This neighborhood is very new: not one of the residential buildings is older than 12 years, and the first ones (the John Ross, Meriwether, Atwater, and Ardea condos) struggled through the 2008 recession to complete construction and achieve occupancy. The more recent ones, like our Matisse, are shorter, more unassuming apartment buildings. Another thousand units are supposed to go up across the street to the east of ours, between us and the river.

Things are going to start hopping just north and west of the park in the Day 4 photo very soon, as well. A second OHSU tower and block-sized parking garage are nearing completion, as is the Knight Cancer Institute building about five blocks further north. More apartment and office buildings, several parks and a community arts facility, and possibly a grocery store, as well as a park and walkway that will connect our neighborhood all the way to downtown Portland (under the bridge where Carole was knocked down by a cyclist two years ago), are all planned in the near future.

It was inevitable that I’d have to include a photo that references the Portland Streetcar. We lived between two of the downtown rail alignments for 10 years, and now we live at the very southern end of the west-side NS line. I’ve been employed by Portland Streetcar as a part-time customer service representative the past 3-1/2 years. When I want to go on shift, I step out the front door of the building, and I’m “at work”!

That job has been an unexpected opportunity to observe and experience wonderful “tales of the city” to share on my Facebook page, and then collect here on my blog at each year’s end. For Day 6 (Oct. 16) I took this shot of a train pulling up to the SW 11th and Taylor platform behind the library featured in Day 2.

As on Day 5, I had no idea what I might shoot for my final day on Oct. 17. After many weeks of sun and even smoke from the Eagle Creek Wildfire, we finally got some rain this month, and that Tuesday brought a little of it. My Day 7 photo was precisely the kind of thing I felt this exercise was meant to capture: a sudden and unforeseen encounter with a shadow-silhouette of a tree branch reflected in rainwater, with fallen leaves that signal the turning of the season.

This is the curb and gutter at the north end of the crosswalk on SW Clay at 6th Avenue. I was on my way north to my credit union two blocks away, when I looked down and noticed this combination of materials and textures. The fall has always been my favorite season: ’way back in my senior year of high school, I put an enlarged color photo in the introductory pages of the yearbook of dry, dead leaves lying on a sidewalk next to the “shadows” of other leaves that had bled their pigments into the concrete after rain.

I turned to face in the direction of the empty lot across the intersection, where a U.S. Post Office used to stand (soon to see construction by the new owner, St. Mary’s Academy Catholic high school for girls), with my back to Revolución Coffee House (formerly Java Man) and the Hotel Modera, and snapped this shot with just a hint of my finger in the lower left corner.