Back in 1980 I was on a balcony on Magazine Street in New Orleans after a rain and the road was wet. The sinking sun was lighting up the street in bursts of high key reflections and the tarmac was blacker than usual being wet. The eroding street lines were making magnificently abstract patterns on the pavement and I said to a friend, "I should get my camera and photograph this for a while." He asked, "How would you go about it and what are you seeing?" I replied, "Well there's potential here for amazingly abstract and high contrast abstractions and I'd do that by underexposing and over developing the negative and printing hard for deep blacks to accentuate the white lines and reflections!" He replied that I should do that now and I said, "I'll do it another time. Let's go eat some Red Beans & Rice at the Bean Pot."
Unbeknownst to me my father Lyle Bonge was living in New York at the time, and seeing the eroding street lines there after a similar rain, had just started doing exactly what I'd planned on. When we spoke I told him of my idea and he said, "Well you're too slow there Paul, I just started doing just that about a week ago!" I deferred to the one who'd done it first and never aggressively pursued that line of work. His images are stark/striking/inky black and contrasty abstractions which he called, "The Cosmos Series."
Here are a couple of my similar ones many years later in digital color and B&W of San Francisco streets. The color one is in strong mid-day light and the B&W is about 1 a.m. using a flash.
1. Bodhi Dharma on The Path, SFCA Sanchez St. Noe Valley: Urban Abstractions
2. PG&E Calligraphy, SFCA Downtown: Urban Abstractions
Some from a Minolta X-700 with a 28-105mm Vivitar f/3.5-4.5 lens. The film was Arista EDU Ultra 100 developed in Spur Acurol-N.
Elements #112
Beauty Boutique
Linesman's Delight
Canopy
CBK
Southside #5