There are many titles that I could choose to attach to this photo. I believe it to be one of the saddest nighttime photos I've ever taken, and sadly prophetic as well. This was immediately outside the liquor department entrance to Osco Drugstore, which used to be located in the now empty building behind Walgreen's on the corner of Providence and Broadway here in Columbia. Earlier on this same evening I had been to a photo exhibit at Legacy Gallery for some friends of mine, then we had gone out for a late dinner at Cornerstone Cafe. Feeling restless and creative, I walked the rest of the way home and took photos as I went. At the time I lived on McBaine Avenue, just a few blocks from Osco Drug. This scene confronted me as I was wandering home. One sad, rain-sodden shopping cart poised expectantly beneath a now sadly dated message..."Buy & Leave Film Here". Buy and leave film here...fourteen years later this sounds like a tombstone message or epitaph for a photographic medium now nearly extirpated, except for those of us who still find the combination of alchemy and magical realism a joy and mystery that far outpaces any that the digital photographic medium can offer. How many items in this story are now extinct? Film is much less commercially available, local film developing is nearly gone, a large, centrally-located drugstore that also offered liquor, furniture, clothing, candy, and a somewhat discotechnical atmosphere is gone, Cornerstone Cafe has been replaced by a trendy dinner spot/club, Legacy is gone...one might even make the case that most metal shopping carts are gone. Could William Carlos Williams have made the same poem about a plastic wheelbarrow?
