Mobility - Let’s talk about it for a second.
I don’t have a driver's license, and I’m not really planning on getting one anytime soon. Even now, as I’m about to detail this flaw I found in not having my own car as a street photographer - I’m still highly against it. The highways are just too damn crazy for my liking. Just witnessing it as a passenger can drive me (hehe) nuts sometimes. Public transport here in Israel has always been pretty good, and except for hiking trails and some remote villages it’s very easy to get by - so apart from what I’m about to talk about, it never was a real issue for me.
But before we dive in, just to give you some context - I had a break from photography for a long time now (maybe even a few years, if you don’t include some nice shots I took with my phone). An unintentional break, if you will. A lack of motivation. A desperate reaction for not finding what I actually like about taking photos. Back then I was shooting only digitally, and I can only guess today that it was probably the ease of fixing terrible exposure mistakes (with magic-like RAW files), that brought me to a feeling of pointlessness (I eventually found my solution in film photography, but that's a topic for another post).
Jumping to December ‘22 - I was back in full gear (2nd hehe), filled with excitement, going out almost every day to shoot whatever I can find. It was then that I started feeling a bit sorry for myself, drooling at the mere sight of every moving vehicle, for I was basically bound to either shoot the same subjects near my house, or take a bus to a random city and hope for the best. You might believe that shooting the same overgrown bike on a sidewalk for months can do you only good, and I might agree with you on that, theoretically - but it’s still quite difficult to keep your motivation on the same level throughout (and also very costly, when you consider film prices nowadays). Another important thing to point out is that I’m more of an urban / architecture / immobilized furniture type photographer, and less interested in actual human activity (yet another topic for a future post) - so while “real” street photographers can work on the same site all their life and still find different faces and emotions every day, an overgrown bike on a sidewalk will forever stay the same (generally speaking of course).
So… I did what had to be done - I started covering, on foot, the entirety of the city I live in, checking out every street and alleyway, and crossing it off on an imaginary map in my head (Pardes-Hanna is technically not a city but a Moshava, which weirdly translates to “settlement”. It’s not THAT kind of settlement. hold your horses). At the beginning it was quite nice, mainly because the starting radius around my house was small and easy to cover. But the more I pushed forward (in a circle-like way) the further I had to walk, and the more a certain amount of planning needed to be made.
And here’s where this flaw of not having a driver’s license suddenly became an opportunity. I couldn't really predict it, as I didn’t exactly know what I would find out - which is that for some reason, Pardes-Hanna has so many secret ruins completely hidden behind her (in my opinion) very much generic and boring-looking streets and structures.
In the course of maybe two to three weeks, I found an ex-shooting range that turned into a rundown communal-type garden;
a completely abandoned and overgrown amphitheater, in the very center of the city;
An old cemetery where some of the graves were still empty, waiting for new "customers", while others were all dug up and ruined (probably by some vengeful hands);
and other dozens of vacant houses, one of them even colonizing hundreds of bats (didn’t really get a picture of them specifically. It was too damn dark. [Insert Batman joke here]).
I guess it should've been obvious to me, that curiosity and exploration are very rewarding - but it wasn't, especially not for a place like this, which to say the least… is quite "normal".
It’s quite an experience, leaving your phone in your pocket and getting lost between endless lines of streets. I just started getting into film photography, so the combination of figuring out how to use the sunny 16 rule, and all the rest of the problems I stumbled upon with this new way of taking photos, together with the terrifying feeling of not knowing where you are - was beyond amazing and unique.
So leave your car alone and go explore your neighborhood!