I spent today taking pictures in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. I am here with my girlfriend visiting her family. I want to make a small book about the town, a spring town which once boasted that it had the 'best water in the world'. when people from around the world visited the town to bathe in the miraculous water. The city started to decline in the 1960s, so today there are a serious of grand building, either disused or in the process of being re-built.
This pictures was taken in the Elms Hotel, the famous hotel where Harry Truman found out that he had won the 1948 presidential election. The picture was taken waiting at the bar, at 3.50, ten minutes before the bar was due to open. The first picture I took was of an empty bar, but for the second someone sat at the bar, as if willing it to open. As I raised my camera a school bus passed through the frame. It created that serendipitous moment, adding that extra piece of motion, colour, excitement to the picture, what Roland Barthes meant by his phrase punkton - that which raises the picture out of the mundane. I suppose that is what I have started trying to do with my photography - Richard Woods Photography - taking pictures of everyday things and people in a reportage / photojournalistic style.
