Spirit Of Place; The Lure Of A Legendary Location Page 2

Charles photographed with either his D100 or D200 and, most often, his 18-200mm lens. Everything was shot by available light. Most of the external shots were handheld, but interiors were always made with a tripod in order to deal with 1⁄8- and 1⁄4-second exposures.

So there you have the who, what, when, and where. The why is harder to pin down. Sure, there was “something about the place.” But what? And why try to capture it?

“I don’t know,” Charles says. “Kings Park just drew me in. Look at the photos—those colors and textures. This is part of history, and it’s disappearing. Most people don’t know it, don’t see it, and they never will see it.”

Perhaps the why has something to do with the fact that Charles typically deals in the clean lines of the commercial image, producing neat, precise beauty shots. “Here was something that was real,” he says of Kings Park. “Here was the chance to do something very different.”

Maybe the location exerts its own influence. “I have ideas for this place,” Charles says. “I think building 93 would be a great setting for a shoot, and I’m trying to get permission to do it. There’d be people dressed as they would have been in the days when the place was open—attendants in uniform and nurses and doctors; and there’d be modern-day people, blurred, as if they were escaping.”

And there’s one more possible why: “It takes a certain ego to be a photographer,” Charles says. “To look at something and think, this is what I think is important; this is what I think should be shown and shared. On the grounds of Kings Park, and in building 93, I was seeing what so many others never saw; what others just pass by and may not even wonder about. But I was there, and here’s the proof.”

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