Upper West Side

Yesterday, I had lunch with Cervin Robinson at his apartment on the Upper West Side. It's in a columned pre-war building just off Broadway, rambling and--well--messy. Conversation usually takes place in the kitchen. We talked about Cervin's proposal to do a book on the "photography of place." Cervin is an architectural photographer who, like Richard Pare, has been involved in editorial projects, and writing about architecture and photography. His book Architecture Transformed, A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present is a classic, alas, now out of print.

Recently, Cervin published some of my Lower East Side pictures in Places, a magazine where he is an editorial consultant. Cervin's own photographs have appeared in numerous books and publications, sometimes illustrating specific architectural styles or the work of individual architects, others times more loosely about the urban landscape. I have always admired the directness and purity of his work--it is less about self-expression, and more about the object, the building, the place.

For my part, I talked about my desire to photograph mega churches around the U.S., a project I am currently calling "the new religious landscape." Mega churches are a mostly suburban phenomenon, and their architecture shares much in common with shopping malls, multiplexes, and big box stores. Sometimes, old shopping centers or theaters have been converted into churches. I am interested in and worried about this sprawling landscape. While the traditional New England town grew around a tall-spired white clapboard church, the new suburbs (or exurbs) spiral about multiple nodes, the mega church campus being but one.