Hydrants

There’s a moment when you realize you’ve taken a lot of portraits of fire hydrants and you’re not sure what to do with them.  Or that happened to me anyway. I started taking them because I was so interested that fire hydrants are ubiquitous the world over, instantly recognizable and yet totally unstandardized. You can’t necessarily drive your fire truck to the next town over and expect to use the hydrants there.  How weirdly American is that?

Or maybe it started when my sisters moved to Pittsburgh and the hydrants had inexplicably different - but very intentional seeming - color schemes.  Now I see hydrants everywhere, always standing like little sentinels, sometimes with an escort of bollards, sometimes a remnant of some forgotten order (like the one in the middle of the lawn at upper Fort Mason where a street used to run through). In New York City alone there are 118,000 hydrants so imagine how many there are world wide.

Each one has so much personality, so my collection keeps growing with no final intent.  I’m taking suggestions. But I guess it’s also just developing without a real plan - sort of like the hydrants themselves.