“Street Close-Ups,” An Art Exhibition by Ron Hartley

Artist’s Statement: I like to photograph things imbedded in urban asphalt or found on the sidewalks and by-ways of city streets.

I love the grungy texture of street art; grunge being an inevitable by-product of the human species that speaks to the human condition like wrinkles to an elderly face.

Someone tosses an empty soda can that gets crushed and rusted with time, a fallen leaf lays like a shipwreck marooned on a strange landscape, a white traffic line cracks up in a time-lapse of years, an oil slick fades in a time-lapse of minutes and I try to find my way there.

Sometimes “there” can be in the middle of heavily trafficked streets where I practically risk my life trying to photograph such things like they were pieces of the Maltese Falcon.

If the sun sits low enough in the sky and a red light stays red long enough, my hopeful eye and photoshop enhancement skills might be able to endow such under-foot kinds of things with the weight and aspect of galactic formations or rare archeological finds.

I like to think of the process as the art of making art out of nothing. 

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