JPG: Stories: Photo Essay: Lunenburg's Parking Meters

Lunenburg's Parking Meters

By Kate Wilhelm

27 May 2008

I was only in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, a UNESCO world heritage site, for the afternoon. The town is full of quaint shops and I very quickly got the flavour of the cliche image of Lunenburg: colourful, quaint, clapboard buildings of different heights along the sea. Ok, so I knew what I didn't want to shoot (besides, I couldn't get onto the ocean to shoot that view).

I enjoyed all the colour and lines of clapboard, and I kept finding parking meters to set them off. On the third parking meter in 10 minutes, I stopped myself. I often find myself drawn to shooting parking meters; they just always seem to add a nice vertical element with their twin round heads. I started to tell myself not to shoot any more parking meters. I don't need a catalogue of parking meters. But then I wondered, why not? Why not use parking meters as a theme for a photographic exploration of Lunenburg?

And I was off. It felt so liberating to just give into my affection for parking meters.

One viewer commented that they're like droll little aliens who have lost all sense of context in their twee landscape. Another said they look almost human. And I realized what I was doing when I shot this series. The parking meters are stand-ins for my touristic jaunt 'round Lunenburg. Where tourists shoot themselves or their loved ones in front of each novel place or thing they encounter, I shot parking meters.