Group Health Bellevue – Medical Center

One of my favorite things about photography is that it allows you to literally create something out of nothing.

Take the 10th St NE overpass that connects the Bellevue medical district to downtown.  An ordinary view of the I-405 highway.  Something nobody would look at twice.

Add in a blue hour sky and an endless stream of cars.  A different source and destination creating every line, intersecting here at this one pixel of existence.  Impossible to simplify, except by closing your eyes and remaining yourself.

Take the 8th St NE exit from I-405.  Add in a Microsoft building all lit up with Bing™.

Take the Group Health Cooperative medical building next to the overpass.  Take the fountain at the entrance.  A symbol of life and birth and renewal.  Something nobody ever sees, because at the gates of the hospital there’s always something more important to consider.

Unless you were across the street, looking in from that strange eternal present tense in which nothing is wrong and nothing will ever go wrong until it does – at which point you cease to care about fountains.

Something that is ultimately nothing.

Near the fountain, take the non-descript patio with a view of downtown Bellevue through WSDOT trees.  Where overworked nurses eat their warmed up lunches, and dream of something more.  Something that leads nowhere.

Take an ambulance, screaming into the night as it races towards emergency facilities buried deep inside the Group Health complex.  Too late, a life lost.  Or just in time, a life saved.  A liminal moment, buried under possibilities, superimposed states that will forever remain unknowable, unobserved.  Many worlds drift off into the night, the photographer entangled with none of them.  Something becomes everything.

Or perhaps not a life lost or saved, but one delivered fresh into this colorful veiled world.  Duality become singular.  A small singularity, evolved from chaos.  Something from nothing.

The complete Flickr set.