July 23, 2023 - Taylor Swift Concert Scene

No, I didn't have a ticket to the Taylor Swift concert -- either of them, on back-to-back days last weekend, that filled the football stadium each time. To be honest I don't really know her music; I think I've only heard two of her songs (yes, I live under a rock). But I'm fully aware of the Melancholia-sized gravity she exerts on our cultural planet, and on Sunday afternoon I couldn't resist heading downtown just to join the surge of teenybopper fandom of all ages and sexes thronging the Pioneer Square streets en route to the stadium, and immerse myself in the scene.

And a scene it surely was, in a theater of the sartorially ebullient. Debouching from the narrow streets into the oceanic parkinglot before Lumen Field I found it brimful and sloshing with thousands of the ticketless faithful who, like me, were happy just to be there and mill about, almost everyone decked out in their best concert-going glitter.

Well, it was a street photography cornucopia, and to be honest there was so much to shoot in every direction all the time that I'm not sure I captured it very well. As you'll see I switched schizophrenically back and forth between color and black-and-white, as the iridescent abandon warred with my social documentarian ethic. Thus bedazzled I wandered about while above us a gap in the stadium wall showed upper bleachers filled and filling with even more thousands of tiny fans. (I broke out my telephoto for those, and for the population watching from building roofs.) When a championship-loud female shriek exploded over the neighborhood and a minute later the muffled thuds of a gargantuan sound system boomed through Seattle I caught the bus home.

Note on the photos: at this point in my photography I only give titles to my "starred pics," i.e., the ones I think are the best, while for the sake of this post I threw in bunch of others just for flavor. That's why some have titles and some don't.