New York/Green-Wood Cemetery

Civil War Soldiers' Monument, Green-Wood Cemetery

I've been pretty busy this week doing architectural shoots, but today I went to the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn to meet and talk with the organizers of an exhibition about the Civil War and New York. I may do a series of pictures for the exhibit. I did a few snapshots, one here of the Civil War Soldiers' Monument, which was erected shortly after the end of the war. It stands on a promintory overlooking the skyline of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.

New York City is dotted with some of the great sculptures of the 19th and early 20th centuries by such artists as Saint-Gaudens and Frederick MacMonnies. It's an underappreciated aspect of the city, and many of the best pieces are virtually unknown to the public. Some are partially obscured by trees. Some are in plain view, but in difficult environments. One particularly unfortunate incident was the moving of the MacMonnies statue of Nathan Hale from the sidewalk of lower Broadway to a relatively inaccessible location within the City Hall gates.


Nathan Hale, old location on Broadway (4x5 film)

Hale stands on his pedestal in defiance, shirt open at the neck. His limbs are bound, but his pose says "take me." The buoyancy of the sculpture is remarkable, as if Hale might leap from his perch if freed from his ropes. Above all, it's an erotic tour de force--even homoerotic--now standing across from the steps of City Hall.

Although many people undoubtedly regard these traditional sculptures as out of touch with modern taste, there are some that remain fixed in the public's imagination. One is the George Washington equestian statue in Union Square Park by Henry Kirke Brown. After September 11, the statue became the focal point of a spontaneous memorial to those who lost their lives in the Twin Towers. Intentional or not, this depiction of America's first president became symbolic of the indefatigability of New Yorkers in this moment of great trial.


Union Square Park, September 2001 (4x5 film)

Unfortunately, this image of dignity and steadfastness competes with the public art across the street--Metronome--by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel.

New York/Virginia

University of Virginia, me and my father

Whenever I vist Williamsburg, Virginia--where I grew up--I always think about the presence of architecture exhibited in the mostly modest structures that were built there in the 18th century. The way in which ideas of a new civilization were carved into the wilderness. The most important of Virginia's early architects was, undoubtedly, Thomas Jefferson. He did not build anything in Williamsburg, where he served in the House of Burgesses, the parliament of colonial Virginia, but carried his ideas west to his own home, Monticello, the Virginia State capital in Richmond, and ultimately, the University of Virginia campus. Both my father and I went to UVA, and though I didn't complete a degree there, I know the place well.

Upon returning to New York, I came across the American Institute of Architects poll "America's Favorite Architecture," and was shocked to find Jefferson's campus missing from the 150 buildings listed--as was Louis Kahn's Salk Institute in California, but that's another story. I have traveled fairly widely, at least in Europe and the US, and have seen many of the world's significant structures. Sometimes, I have had to warm up to certain buildings, walk around them, go inside, approach from different angles. As an architectural photographer I tend to stalk buildings, creep up on them, or try to surprise myself with an unexpected glance of the familiar. But sometimes, a building or a place will thrill me the first time around: the Parthenon, Corbusier's Ronchamp chapel, Wright's Falling Water (also not on the list), Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower, Rockefeller Center, Gaudi's Casa Mila, just to name some prominent ones.

After having seen all these other great buildings I still find Jefferson's "academical village" one of the purest expressions of conceptual idealism in the world. Its design elements quote Roman and Greek classicism--the Rotunda is directly based on the Pantheon--while the organization of the space encourages the democratic interaction of professors and students. On the one hand, the space of the lawn creates an embracing enclosure, and on the other hand the lawn's expanse leading to a view of the adjacent mountains opens this sanctuary of learning out to the world. The open end of the lawn was misguidedly closed off years ago, but the overall effect is only partially diminished.

I was not surprised to find that Americans favored older buildings, important icons, and emotionally or politically charged symbols like the World Trade Center. I, too, would place the Empire State Building up high on my list. But to completely miss what is arguably the greatest architectural work on the continent--among the finest in the world--designed by Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence, is just unthinkable.

Virginia/Jamestown 1607-2007

Captain John Smith statue, Jamestown, Virginia

The last few days I was in Williamsburg, Virginia to visit my 85 year old father who remains active despite the usual infirmities that come with a long life. We spent one day touring Colonial Williamsburg, and another at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. This year is the 400th anniversary of Jamestown.

The most famous and important of the Jamestown settlers was Captain John Smith, whose colorful life is chronicled on a panel beneath his statue overlooking the James River. Whether Pocahontas actually saved Smith's life, as he claimed, or not, the known facts of his 51 years as soldier, slave, explorer, and leader are impressive enough. Adjacent to the Smith statue is the recently discovered footprint of the original Jamestown fort, and just beyond, the tower of the 17th century church with its rebuilt sanctuary. Inside is a plaque, placed in 1959 by the Virginia State Bar, that speaks powerfully to the present, and the chipping away of liberties once thought sacred.


Jamestown, Virginia

The text of the plaque refers to the Magna Carta and Common Law, which served as the basis for the American constitution and Bill of Rights. The principles of Common Law include the right to habeas corpus, due process, and the right to a jury of ones peers.

The last line of the plaque above reads:

Since Magna Carta the Common Law has been the cornerstone of individual liberties, even as against the crown, summarized later in the Bill of Rights its principles have inspired the development of our system of freedom under law, which is at once our dearest possesion and proudest achievement.

New York/Ground Zero

Ground Zero/WTC


Ground Zero/WTC

I took an exploratory walk with my view camera around the World Trade Center site today. It was in the mid-20s and icy underfoot, but the air was clear and sharp. I hadn't been down there with my camera since just after 9/11, on Broadway, the first day they let people get that close. It was rough going that day trying to set up a view camera among thousands of jostling people--all with cameras, of course-- but I got a couple of good photographs.


Broadway, September 2001 (4x5 film)

At one point I stepped off Broadway onto a side street away from the crush of gawkers. A man walked up carrying a single digital camera, no camera bag as I recall, and he asked me if I was a documentary photographer. I said yes, more or less. I looked at him more intently, and then said, you're James Nachtwey aren't you. He said yes. Later that week I saw his extraodinary pictures of the scene in Time magazine.


Ground Zero/WTC

After that, Joel Meyerowitz got access to Ground Zero and made the photographs that are now published in an oversized book called Aftermath. I had no press pass or special access, so I left the subject alone except peripherally in images made in other places. Now that the big boys have left for other photographic battlefields, maybe it's time for me to do what I have always tried to do--take a longer, more patient, view of history.

New York/The F Blog

Tippelzone (prostitution zone), Amsterdam (4x5 film)

A few months ago I was invited by Joakim Sebring of the F Blog, a weblog on photography maintained by a group of photographers based in Sweden, to submit a series of my pictures of Amsterdam. It took me a while to get the portfolio together, but I have now finished a new batch of scans of my Amsterdam work. The photographs and short essay can be found on the F Blog. It looks great. Thanks, Joakim for the opportunity.

Here's the part of the essay that goes with the photo above:

Among the strangest sights on the periphery of Amsterdam was a fenced in drive surrounded by a sidewalk and a dozen bus shelters—also situated along a rail viaduct. During the day it was deserted. At night cars circled the drive as men ogled the women standing in the shelters. This was Amsterdam’s official prostitution zone (tippelzone), an attempt to regulate drug-addicted prostitutes and remove them from the center of town. The attempt failed for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which was the admission by a prominent city councilman that he frequented the zone. The tippelzone closed in 2003, but the paved circuit and bus shelters remain.

New York/Toys in Brooklyn

Toys in Brooklyn

We spent the weekend visiting friends in Brooklyn, shopping at the Strand bookstore, playing and helping with Junior Knicks basketball at the Y. But through it all I could never push out of my mind the war in Iraq, the President's "surge," and the sabre rattling aimed at Iran. The Times ran an editorial today about William Butler Yeats' poem The Second Coming relating it to current events. The poem was written at the end of World War I at a particularly bleak point in history, and I can't help but feel we are on the verge of slipping into our own era's senseless world war--call it World War III. Who will rise to stop this insanity? As Yeats wrote, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

New York/The Snow of Yesteryear

Orchard Street, New York City, February 11, 2006 (4x5 film)

It's been cold in New York City of late, but no snow. Upstate there's 10 feet or more of the white stuff. Here it's been dry as a bone. The Hudson is partly frozen over, but no snow. People talk about the snows of long ago, historical winters undisturbed by the spectre of global warming. Just a quick reminder. I took the photograph above exactly one year ago on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. 26.9 inches. The largest single snowfall in New York City history.

New York/Unisphere

Brendan, my son, and the Unisphere

My first trip to New York was in 1964, when I was 10 years old, to see the World's Fair. I traveled from Virginia with my father in a tiny English Ford, and we camped in a state park on Long Island to save money, over an hour away from the city. We spent a couple of days at the World's Fair, and one day visiting sites in the city like the Empire State Building. The fair made a big impression on me, especially the auto company pavillions, which presented the future as a gleamingly clean environment of high rises, green spaces, and freeways filled with swiftly moving vehicles. The fair was to a great extent a creation of Robert Moses whose efforts to reshape New York with high rises, green spaces, and freeways, is still evident today, albeit with mixed results.


The New York City Panorama, the Queen's Museum

There are several Robert Moses exhibits on display around New York right now--one at the Queen's Museum opposite the Unisphere, which was the centerpiece of the World's Fair. I had hoped to see the exhibit, but my family threesome left a little late from Manhattan, so in the remaining hour before closing time we settled on seeing the newly reopened New York City Panorama. This, like the Unisphere, is a remnant of the World's Fair and Robert Moses' vision of New York color-coded to highlight his achievments. In 1964, one rode above the meticulously detailed scale model of the city in a mock helicopter. Today, a ramp leads visitors around the model allowing one to linger and watch a recently updated multimedia presentation. The city depicted by the model is frozen in the early 1990s, and the Twin Towers reign over Lower Manhattan. I was captivated by the Panorama back in 1964, and it's still an awesome sight today.

New York/Cropping

From Henri Cartier-Bresson's Scrap Book, Thames & Hudson

An interesting print in the Cartier-Bresson exhibit at ICP shows an uncropped version of the famous photo (behind St. Lazare station) in which a man leaps across a pool of water, his foot a millimeter from touching the surface with his image mirrored in it. The ICP print allows one to see how the original image was partially obscured by a fence, a fault that Cartier-Bresson immediately "corrected" by cropping in along the left side and bottom, keeping the 35mm format intact.

Cartier-Bresson, perhaps, is the photographer who originated the idea of filling the frame as determined by the camera, in his case, a Leica 35mm rangefinder. Before him, most photographers thought primarily about the finished print, which might convey an image of any proportion, manipulated in any number of ways--still a legitmate way of thinking. But for Cartier-Bresson, the 35mm frame was the image, not something to be made later. The precise geometry of his pictures, the relationship between foreground and background, and the placement and attitude of people all were played out across the frame. He worked, generally, with one fixed focal length lens. No zoom. Either the image worked as is, or it did not.

Many photographers have followed Cartier-Bresson's example, such as Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and William Eggleston--the pantheon of what is known as street photography. This aesthetic has influenced those of us who use view cameras as well. I rarely crop the 4x5 frame, and try to make the image happen in the camera as much as possible. I know, however, that with such a large piece of film, there is more latitude available for cropping. For me, that means that when shooting in the field, I sometimes keep the edges loose, with the idea of pulling in slightly when scanning or making a print later. But I still walk around with two commandments in my head: fill the frame, and move in closer. I adhere pretty strictly to the former, but I have learned over the years the vitue of maintaining ones distance. But that's a discussion for another time.

When I was a student I wrote a report on Alfred Stieglitz, who for a while captivated me. I was chiefly interested in his urban images, especially the views from out his gallery window on the skyline of New York. One famous image of his shows the Flatiron Building at 23rd and 5th Avenue in the snow, a y-shaped split in a tree intersecting the prow of the building. It's an extreme vertical image focused on the moment of this intersection. It's obvious that the image was cropped. No camera that Stieglitz used would have created this proportion. Stiegltitz's final cropping has always been considered the definitive version of that image.


The Flatiron Building,
Alfred Stieglitz

While researching my paper, I traveled down to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and went through their extensive collection of Stieglitz prints. What I found, along with the usual narrowly vertical print, was an uncropped Flatiron image showing more of the pathway and benches of Madison Square Park and more sky around the building. I've never seen this print exhibited or published, and I do not know whether Stieglitz ever commented about the existence of the full frame version. To my eye--perhaps conditioned by Cartier-Bresson's dictim of filling the frame, or Walker Evans' example, which allowed for anecdotal details to register without necessarily focusing on them--I found the uncropped Flatiron image less willfully artful, and therefore, better than the Stieglitz final. At least that's how I remember it. I wish I could show it here, but as far as I know the only existing image lies in a flat file in the photography department of the National Gallery.