Figure 1 – Abstract in asphalt. (c) DE Wolf 2018.

Along the theme of yesterday’s post “What is it,” today I’d like to share the IPhone photograph taken during my daily walk yesterday. It shows a section of asphalt which has been “repaired” by a dizzy street worker with tar. That’s worker not walker! The cracks create the random pattern and the street worker has dribbled tar, much like Jackson Pollack would paint. There is also a proper way to repair this kind of thing.Also my colleague rightly asked me, why was I photographing the pavement.

For me the appeal is the tone-on-tone, not white-on-white but black-on-black. One might be tempted to see in this image some poetic irony concerning “the first photograph” taken by Niépce in asphalt in 1826 and  a photograph of asphalt. But really it is meant to be a photograph of asphalt, nothing more than its own abstraction.

There remains the troubling question of yesterday of the “what is it?” mystery. It is the shadow, umbral and penumbral, of a microwave cover, which has holes in it to vent air.