Alphabet adventure

Last spring, Hulk had an assignment for one of his art classes that took some explaining. As we were walking to the grocery store one day, he described this project as his teacher had described it to his class: a found alphabet. Meaning, he and his classmates were required to find all 26 letters of the alphabet in the outdoor world without actually taking pictures of lettering (like, on a sign or whatever). Though I'm not especially artistically inclined, I found myself getting really excited about this project, and since his teacher had told them about the thing before spring break, Hulk had a chance to take all his photos when we went to the Bay Area.

We spent several days walking around San Francisco and Berkeley, and my eye began to be attracted to letter shapes. We found letters on buildings, on sidewalks, in decorative details and occuring naturally in plants. Sometimes unexpected objects resembled letters from a different perspective. We spent time with several people during the trip, and told everyone about the letter project so people wouldn't think we were freaks when Hulk pulled out a camera and took a picture of a bench or a wet ring left on a table in the Indian fast-food place. We ended up finding several versions of each letter - sometimes in lower case, sometimes in upper - and Hulk had quite a few to choose from when putting together his final alphabet.

Here is the final project (photo-wise, anyhow; his actual project involved a book he made out of the photographs, and it's really cool). The letter you see above is my favorite photograph.