If you’re anywhere along Tryon Street in uptown Charlotte around 6:15 tonight, you’ll be photographed. Volunteers, 150 of them, will simultaneously snap what will turn into one very long picture of the street. It’s part art project, part documentary, and part promotion.
You may love Tryon street like Mike Sandford whose office looks out on it:
“I think it’s a very vibrant and beautiful street,” he says.
You may be upbeat about it, but see room for improvement like Yvonne Curtis.
“We’re fairly corporate and bland, but we do have a lot to offer,” she says.
Right now you may very well hate it like commuter Danny Bess:
“They’ve got all these streets that coincide with each other and they got construction on all of them and cones in the middle of the roads,” he says. “You have to go one lane for miles. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Photographer Sean Busher doesn’t necessarily want to change the way you think about Tryon Street, he just wants you to really take it in and, at least, find it interesting.
“I want people to see everything that happens along this stretch of uptown Charlotte in any moment,” says Busher.
There’s one moment in particular. That’s tonight when a photographer will be stationed every 40 feet along Tryon to capture the whole one mile uptown section of it. At 6:15 they’ll all click in unison, then, five minutes later capture the other side of Tryon.
“On the one hand this is a street photographer moment in the life of Charlotte circa 2014,” explains Busher.
“But on the other hand we know when we line up 150 people with all their equipment and cameras and tripods, we know we’ll be causing a little bit of a scene. So we decided to really open ourselves up and say, “Come, photobomb us. Come be part of the art we’re creating.”
It’s also a promotion for the Light Factory. After nearly closing last year, the photography and film museum is opening at Midwood School just east of uptown. Busher wanted to do something big to celebrate that.
The photos will be stitched together digitally. That should take about a week.
“The end product will be a 100 foot print. When you line up 150 photographs, a 100 foot photograph is about four or five inches high. It’s going to be this tiny little strip that goes on and on and on,” says Busher. “There will be a lot to see, but you’ll have to use your feet and walk along the exhibition.”
The Arts and Science Council is working on finding a place to exhibit the photo. It will be called “Moment Mile, the Ultimate Panorama.”
