There was a thought that occurred to me around the time that I took this shot. A thought that wasn't fully pursued then, but which I need to.

Prior to my sea change last year I had been in a much more urban environment. However I did very little photography in that environment. Partly because I didn't consider it all that photogenic, partly because I didn't want to be too specific about where I lived so I'd tend to skew the shots by going to neighbouring suburbs. That's not the point. This is the point; one of the reasons for us ("us" as in photographers) doing what we do is so that there is some kind of permanent record. A way to look back in years to come and say "that was what it was like, back then". Doing abstracts and lighting effects can be artistically satisfying and I'm in no way saying that we shouldn't be doing that. I plan to keep doing that too. But what I also want to start doing more of is documenting the environment around me. At home that will probably mean a lot of beachscapes, at work, cityscapes. Not all of these will be exciting or eye catching, and may even start to get repetitive. But even the mundane, such as this building, tells a story. Or will do, in years to come. When things change, when a business that has been in place for years moves on or a building that was part of the background disappears through redevelopment, at least it remains preserved photographically. Atget understood this over a century ago, but we do sometimes need to remind ourselves of it.

This area of Pyrmont was once home to working docks and some of the support facilities related thereto, including this marine diving services company. I'm not sure whether they're still in business (there are some directory listings for them on various web sites but no web page of their own) but it's safe to say that this building was left to its own devices some time back, though someone is clearly still maintaining it as it doesn't look very run down. The telephone number is 7 digits, while we moved to 8 digits back in the last couple of years of the last century. Similarly the "018" prefix on the mobile number relates to the first generation of mobile phones, back in the early '90's or earlier.

Whether this building continues to stand or not, this shot of it, with people strolling or running past at lunchtime, according to their choice, will continue to exist.

It's the shots that you don't take that are the ones that you regret, some day.

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Edit, August 2023: This seems to be a rare example of a PBase shot being indexed. It does indeed get search hits from Google et al, which is incredibly rare on PBase which Google indexing seems to largely ignore. The search is indeed for Arrow Marine Diving, since this is one of the few places on the Internet that still has a reference to it.

It's fortunate that I took the shot when I did, though. Around February 2020 it looks like a significant amount of remediation work was done on the building, Covid notwithstanding. The building was surrounded by scaffolding and hoardings. By November 2020 the work was done, but all of the signage relating to Arrow was gone.