Walking through Portland, Oregon: city sights
Last summer, during a visit to Portland, Oregon, I decided to go for walks around the city taking pictures with my cell phone. Since I moved to Cape Town in 2021, and my daughter moved to Portland, I have visited this great city a few times but never really visually documented it.
This time around, I thought I would catch a bus to downtown Portland or walk around different neighborhoods and just look and take street photos with the eye of a tourist, which in truth I am but since my daughter lives there I seem to forget and tend to feel Portland is like a second home, with all the familiarity of actually being my daughter’s home.
I am not a photographer by profession but I am a visual storyteller. I create scenes, sets, and all sorts of vignettes that are photographed or filmed by others. So the visual attention is always present. I enjoy sightseeing and looking at whatever I encounter in front of me: people, art, architecture, store windows, and everything else that passes by or meets my eyes.
Many years ago, while living in NY, I used to always carry a small Canon PowerShot SD1000 camera, basically a point and shoot camera, good for personal photography and also for work prep but now, all I have is my phone in my pocket, a single device that seems to do it all. So that’s what I used as I walked around PDX feeling like I was a visitor for the first time.
PDX are the three letters that represent the airport code of the Portland International Airport, assigned by the International Air Transportation Association but it has become one of the most used nicknames for this city and one that is widely used by locals and visitors alike.
So for a few days, I took a bus to get to downtown PDX and then walked around for hours, looking, taking phone pictures and pausing to take in the city’s looks, colors, shapes, idiosyncrasies, its pulse: a mix of cool, hippie, artsy. A city very alive with lots of people coming and going, in the midst of modern and traditional architecture all lined up in visual harmony.
At the end of my tourist journey, I looked at my photos and realized that I had an interesting bunch of images made up mostly of two very distinct and specific subjects. Not deliberate choices but ones that happened spontaneously: architecture, featuring old and new buildings and art and graffiti decorating walls. The images were taken either in Downtown Portland or the East Side of PDX, and the visual juxtaposition that emerged from those images highlighted the vibes of this wonderful, vibrant and happening city that is full of expression, never dull, always eye-catching.
I really like PDX, a place in the world I can get to in about 30 hours door to door. I know, it does sound like a very far away destination to get to from Cape Town, South Africa, but hey, my daughter lives there so the long trip is infinitely worth it!