Brighton, UK

I didn’t spot this one from above, and I’ve never been to Brighton, but a video from Phil Carr had me convinced I needed to take a look at this privately-owned landmark-monument-amusement combo known as the i360 observation tower. Of course it looms, but what interests me more is what it looms over: the remnants of the old Victorian West Pier. Abandoned since the 1970s, and arson’d twice during the pandemic, all that now remains is a steel frame. At the turn of the penultimate century, daredevil cyclists would compete to see how far they could launch themselves off of the pier, observed by people swathed in acres of promenading finery, but now the scrap of it is eulogized in a poem by Brighton puppeteer/artist Ann Perrin:

A huge tower of steel and glass will be its tombstone. Long queues will make their way for a chance to glance at an uncertain landscape. Rumbling, crashing, crumbling. “Doesn’t it look tidy now?” says a passerby.

–from “The Fall of the West Pier”, 2010

Karachi Harbor, Pakistan

In the gravity of the world’s 12th-largest city - with a population of 20 million - 8,000 people can seem like a small number. But that is the approximate population of Baba and Bhit islands, perched just above the tideline across from the Port of Karachi. In this capture, the islands have their own constellations of hundreds of small boats moored in orbit.

Though they host a large fishing industry, most food and medical services are transported to the islands by boat, and until 2023 a single hydrant provided drinking water. Since then a reverse-osmosis processing plant has been in operation.

Harwood, Arkansas

A tug labors against the flow, pushing a huge barge train Northward on the Mississippi. I don’t know what sort of ores, lumber, or goods were being transported in this image, but I do know that on that April day the river was already at flood stage, on its way to a historic crest in June of that year. The sandy shoals are already receding, and the waters are flowing through the forests past the riverbank.

The Mississippi “cannot be tamed, curbed, or confined . . . you cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over and laugh at.”

–Mark Twain