I'll admit that I picked tonight's photo to be a bit of a filler post. While I have a decent collection of items to pick from at this point, I feel like a couple of them deserve more research than I was up for tonight. I also have a much greater horde of uncorrected photos that I really need to start digging myself out of. This is of course top of the collection of personal practice photos and a project for a friend that I really need to look at, but that's on a different level of issues. Despite the fact that the plan is to use it as a placeholder for the evening, I do think it's one of the more intriguing things that I've photographed. I love the convex mirror in the foreground and how it distorts the walkway over Forbes on Pitt's campus. It gives you just a little peek of what's actually behind me while I'm taking the photo. I also like that the curved edge of the mirror breaks up the straight symmetry of the building in the background, Bruce Hall if I remember right (which I really should since I did live in it for a year). And on top of all of these interesting elements you have the multiple stickers along the bottom of the mirror. Granted the various elements do make for a interesting photo but a bit of a busy one, bringing me back to my decision to make this a filler. Rather than deter from any one piece of the photo by focusing on a particular sticker, I give you the full image and you can pick your favorite thing about it.
Of course I don't want to give you a bunch of stickers without looking at them at all, I just don't bog things down with an attempt at finding information on everything. In the end though my short dip into research turned up more than I had bargained for. The WPTS sticker is Pitt's on campus radio station, which I did end up writing a post about a couple of months ago. This version is just slightly fancier than what I presented, so easy enough. Over on the left side of the mirror there is a rather difficult one to completely make out at this size but when you zoom in it's a very stylized "Fuck Cancer." A little surprisingly when you look this up, you actually get at least two different organizations with this name. One that originated in California and one in Canada. I feel pretty safe assuming that this is the Canadian organization's sticker, looks pretty close to it's logo, but this would certainly be an interesting thing to write an entire post on. And then there is the "disrupt. vote. disrupt" sticker. As I'm sure you can imagine, these words are a little too vague to successfully come up with a source for the design. But this is definitely an interesting phrase and idea, one that seems highly relevant in today's charged political climate. So it could have been an interesting thought to develop for a night. Moving back up the mirror, you come across a very "Voodoo" inspired sticker that says Billy Pilgrim beneath the head. This one certainly threw me for a loop since I tried looking the name up first, not realizing that this is character from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five as it's on my list of things I need to read at some point. Gradually I managed to make my way to the correct mind behind this sticker, a local rapper with the name Billy Pilgrim. Again certainly a subject that deserves it's own post. And the final sticker worth looking at is the Evil Greed sticker as it certainly stands out the most, at least to my eye. It was when I was researching this sticker, it was probably the second one I looked up, that I came to the realization that tonight was going to be contradictory to my desire for a quick and simple post. As soon as I hit their site, the first thing that really caught my attention was the fact that the prices on the page were all in euros. I can't say that the site itself gives a clear indication as to what it's about, since it's a large group of items, bands, and lots of drop down menus, but heading over to their Bandcamp page tells you that this is a Label for artists in the Punk, Hardcore, and Metal arenas of the music industry. It's also where I discovered that this label is based in Berlin, Germany. I mean seriously, when it rains it pours. All of these stickers deserve a post to themselves, delving far more into what each group is about and what can be deduced from the fact that I found their sticker here. Unfortunately I really only know for certain that I have another shot of one of them. All I can hope for is that hidden in the mass that I call my photo collection is another usable image of all of these stickers, or in the very least that I manage to come across them again.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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