The Poison Shop, October 2017

Riding public transportation at night in Chicago provides me with plenty of visual stimulation and subject matter. The cityscape reminds me of a stage set, and I am the sole member of the audience paying attention in the theater that is the #22 Clark Street bus. Each night as I return home, I photograph the passing scene through the bus window: I am a passenger, as well as an observer with a camera. The most common and mundane street scene transforms into a hallucinatory revelation when I engage in the art-making process: the result is a transformation of dreary expectations into conceptions "beyond the limits of reason".

In this case, I made two photographs within a few seconds, while the bus was momentarily delayed at an intersection. Because it was evening, requiring a long shutter speed, the camera's slightly wide-angle lens was placed directly against the window, to limit any unintentional camera movement (I never look through the camera itself when I make photographs this way). These two pictures were combined into one new image. This double-image was shortly thereafter duplicated, and I now had two identical double-images. The next step was to reverse the duplicate so that it was a mirror image of the first double-image. Finally, both images were then seamlessly joined to each other, and the resulting file was "flattened" in Photoshop, resulting in this final image.

It became a photograph of a shop selling poison, flowers, and poisoned flowers; I would exercise caution before entering, no matter how inviting it seems.