This Telephone Pole Is Ready for Its Close-Up

Telephone poles deal with a lot: dog pee, staple guns and remnants of long-past concert posters. But the humble telephone pole is now also the subject of a photography exhibit by Portland artist Heléna Dupre Thompson. Bridge City Diary is on view in the storefront windows of 811 SE Stark St. through Dec. 16.

“These are archives of our city,” Dupre Thompson says. “I’m especially visually attracted to them because of how they can become so weathered and worn and affected.”

Thompson has returned to the same telephone poles—the ones on display are mostly in Northeast and Southeast—over the course of seven years to shoot, capturing the changes over time. Some of the images appear burnt, all charcoal black, curly-edged leaflets. (Before moving to Portland and devoting herself to art and music full time, Thompson had a career as a firefighter in Minneapolis.)

Dupre Thompson is represented by Laura Vincent Design & Gallery in the Pearl District. She had a show there in May of close-up photos of the detritus of other artists’ workspaces—clumps, spatters, swirls and brushstrokes of paint. Both that show and Bridge City Diary consist of overlooked objects, shot as abstracts with little context.

Bridge City Diary was financed through a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant. Her goal is to capture the essence of an object—the paint spill, the telephone pole—in a compelling enough manner that it stands on its own, even if a viewer doesn’t know the backstory.

Her hope for viewers is “to be able to see this thing—that some people would think is unsightly and doesn’t have any value—in a way where there is a history there.”