Yesterday, I walked again with my view camera up to Chelsea to photograph the IAC building, the first Frank Gehry building completed in New York. It's fun for me to do this kind of thing when there's no client breathing down my neck, and I can take things as they come. A few days ago I approached the building from the east, which one glimpses between existing brick warehouses and old factory buildings.
The High Line
The High Line cuts through the city along 10th Avenue, and its transformation into an elevated promenade is already well underway. This strip is rapidly turning into the most stylish area of Manhattan with art galleries and cutting edge architecture. At the moment, there is a certain happy tension between the gritty desolation of vacant lots and the encroaching chic and sleek.
IAC building
IAC building
This time I approached the IAC building along West Street where it faces the Hudson River and the vast Chelsea Piers sports complex. As I've noted before, the building has the appearance of ship in full sail, its folds and pleats suggesting a southward heading. I'm not usually enthusiastic about such literal references in architecture, but I think in this case, the representational imagery is sufficiently abstracted formally.
IAC building
The snow-white fritted glass has been disparaged by some as better befitting a suburban office park, but I find the crystalline folds and fragments of the curtain wall quite beautiful. That said, this is not one of Gehry's most ground-breaking efforts. It is, however, an elegant, urbane, building that dares to sashay in a town more prone to marching, at least architecturally speaking.
I walked up to Chelsea by way of the Meatpacking District (Gansevoort Market), the formerly gritty meat market inhabited by bloody-aproned butchers and meat cutters as well as transvestite prostitutes. The area is now the epicenter of New York cool. The beautiful people wobble about on the cobblestones, and edge their way around the slabs of meat still hanging from hooks in front of the handful of remaining meat businesses. Like the Fulton Fish Market, New York is rapidly losing another piece of raw open air commerce. And like Soho, the area is destined to lose its buzz,though it's hard to imagine where else the buzz can go in Manhattan.
One of the remaining meat businesses in the Gansevoort Market
For the time being, the Gansevoort Market and the Chelsea art district possess the kind of urban contrasts that I love to photograph. The High Line--the derelict elevated rail line--is under construction at the south end, and various buildings are going up around and literally over it with one structure straddling the viaduct. Of great interest is the almost finished IAC building designed by Frank Gehry. It's Gehry's first New York project, though there are numerous now in the pipeline.
IAC building in rear
IAC building
I'm fond of the building, not exactly in a critical sense, but in the way this white glass apparition emerges from its neighborhood of mostly brick warehouses. Since it will undoubtedly be photographed by other accomplished architectural photographers, I've decided to look at the building in a more contextual way, not worrying so much about definitive signature views. I also know that as the neighborhood changes, and more projects fill the large gaps that surround the IAC building, the building will no longer float so aloofly above the fray. Like many fine buildings in New York, it will be come part of the furniture. I spent several morning hours working the east side of the building poking around parking lots and openings between buildings. My intention is to return for afternoon views later this week.
Avenue C and East 10th Street
In the afternoon I took the L train over to the East Side and picked up again on photographing the Lower East Side. I walked across East 13th Street down Avenue C and over to Avenue B at Tompkins Square Park. I did several street views, and then spent almost an hour in the Campos Community Garden at East 9th and Avenue C. The trees were just beginning to show a hint of green. The morning began with a dynamic mixture of sun and clouds, but by later in the afternoon, the sky cleared, and the temperature soared almost to 65 degrees.
On Sunday I fetched the paper as usual, turned to the Metro section as usual, and was surprised to see a photograph of James Presson, the 16 year-old son of good friends of mine, along with two other students from Wilton High School who have created a play about Iraq told primarily through the voices and writings of soldiers and their families. The principal of the school, Timothy Canty, has blocked the production of the play, Voices in Conflict, because of the complaint of one parent, who believes the play is biased. I don't know how the story was picked up by the Times, but given that Wilton is a well-heeled community with lots of movers and shakers in the New York area, it makes sense that something like this would filter out. The story was quickly picked up by several blogs, most notable Firedoglake, which recently dominated the coverage of the Scooter Libby perjury/obstruction of justice trial.
Jimmy, as you might well imagine, is an outstanding person, the kind of student that schools should be encouraging not quashing. He's destined to do great things, despite weak-kneed people like Canty. I've been there myself–back in the early 70s–at the end of the Vietnam War when I ran for student council vice president of Walsingham Academy, a Catholic school in Williamsburg, Virginia. My views about things didn't sit well with the principal, a nun who did not understand what was going on in the school, or the outside world for that matter, and felt threatened by outspoken students like me. Never mind the fact that I was a good student, and a starter on the basketball team. I had to be taught a lesson.
One morning the entire upper school was called into the auditorium for an unscheduled assembly. The principal and vice principal then proceeded to denounce my campaign literature as well as things I had written in the school newspaper without actually mentioning my name. This shocking vilification, which to this day wounds me deeply, went on for at least a half an hour before we were sent back to our homerooms to begin the school day. I went home that evening unable to explain or discuss things with my parents who were largely clueless about what went on at the school. However, one of my teachers, Mrs. Johnson, called and told them what at happened, and said that they should feel proud of me. Mrs. Johnson, as U.S. government and social studies teacher, instilled in me a profound respect for the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the very things that are endangered today by the criminal cabal that led us into Iraq.
It's obvious that Jimmy Presson has lots of support, and it's coming in from far and wide. But he still has to walk into a school where, as I understand it from him, enthusiasm is tepid. For example, the student body president said in a post on the Voices in Conflict website: In fact, there is a very large portion of the students who support the principal, since for the most part he has only helped us out with our endeavors in the past. I do not know if any of you are school administrators (I certainly am not), but you should probably respect the fact that you get a lot of critisism (sic) for your actions. If this had gone the other way, Mr. Canty probably would have been the target of the voiced opposition (the family with the son in iraq). When it comes down to it, I do not know if his call was the right one, but it was his call to make. Please don't think that I as a president don't care how my students feel, but I cannot simply go in favor of a militant minority as opposed to an apathetic majority.
I've been reading Adam Gopnik's most recent collection of essays, some previously published in the New Yorker, Through the Children's Gate. After returning from two years in Paris, he rediscovers New York, especially as seen through his children's eyes.In one essay he finds himself on school safety patrol and in the process sees the block he's assigned to in a totally different way--a much slowed down more richly detailed place.
It's an experience I'm familiar with moving randomly down the street with my view camera sometimes taking several hours just going a handful of blocks. One becomes aware of a countless small things that are invisible when flowing with the crowd in the street or whizzing by in a taxi or bus. As Gopnik writes: "Density reveals itself as a particular pattern of parts: this odd little auction house, and this garage entrance beside it, and the two rival rental-car offices anchored by the garage, and the tailors down the stairs into this basement, and the Chinese restaurant that no one ever seems to enter or order from two doors away."
In the slowed down world seen by few--the cop on the beat, the mailman, the photographer--the city seems suspended, still, the rushing pace of everything else blurs by and one becomes aware of a face, a figure, a buzzing neon light, the denizens of the block, the intimate moments held within the great rushing of sight and sound. Something, it would seem, is about to happen, a latent meaning suggests itself, then vanishes.
Chop Suey, Edward Hopper, 1929 Gopnik: "On one street, a thousand small efforts at making a living, none seeming obviously to thrive; all, in fact, to a single policeman's passing eye, as empty and soulful as a Hopper afternoon interior, and yet it works. Somehow it thrives. (What Hooper was showing, it occurred to me, was not the desolation but the energy of American life: This is what capitalist city looks like most of the time, half asleep and waiting.)"
It's always a question, what is it I am up to out there with my camera? When I was a student shooting 35mm slides I alternately went with the flow of the street and fought against it until I tied myself in knots with the exercise. It was color on color, pattern on pattern, light and dark, gesture juxtaposed against gesture, people in motion, everything stretched to the limit across the frame of the camera. I look back and there's an exhilaration in it all, but I can also see where I had to stop, regroup, and think about why. It was then that I began working with the view camera. I had to slow down.
Orchard Street (Fausty/Rose 4x5 film) 1980 Gopnik: "That tone cops have--that steady wariness, even if you ask them for something simple and innocent, directions or advice--is the product of their experience. There really are sinister jigsaw-puzzle patterns out there, and you may be one of the pieces. This is why cops, so to speak, examine your edges even as they answer your entreaties."
To me as a photographer it's also about examining the edges, taking nothing at face value, recognizing the patterns, and walking the beat.
The former Leninplatz in East Berlin, 1990 (4x5 film)
I saw The Lives of Others today sitting in a sparsely-filled midday showing at the Angelica on Houston Street. The movie, which recently won the best foreign language Oscar, is a deeply felt psychological thriller about life in the German Democratic Republic (DDR/East Germany) before the Wall came down. Much has been written about the film, the superb acting, the compact well-told story, and the clear laconic directing style of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. So, I will confine my remarks to visual elements.
The Lives of Others is first and foremost about the interplay of the characters, and the story, it seems to me, could as easily be adapted for the stage as for the screen. That is not to say that the setting, both the exterior views of Berlin, and the interior views of apartments, are unimportant or not well-photographed. But the streetscape is glimpsed--often effectively--rather than lingered on. Although much has changed in Berlin in the 17 years since the collapse of the communist regime, there are countless streets throughout the former East Berlin that still feel, at a glance anyway, frozen in time. There are scores of buildings still pock-marked from World War II shrapnel, and vast tracts of DDR era housing remain at the edges of the city. Finding appropriate locations for the film did not require much recreation.
Prenzlauerberg, East Berlin, 1987 (4x5 film)
In the film, the writer Georg Dreyman lives in a commodious Berlin apartment at the top of a turn of the century walk-up, much like others I've seen, in Prenzlauerberg. The Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler lives in a sterile high rise like the one shown above on Leninplatz. In one scene, Dreyman and a couple of dissident artists stroll through a Soviet war memorial in Pankow in order to converse out of earshot of the Stasi. I photographed a similar Soviet memorial in Treptow in 1990. The film shows nothing of the Wall's quick demise, the rush of people through it on the night of 9 November 1989, but it's easy to spot the grafitti-plastered buildings of post-Wall Berlin, and the odd mix of western and eastern cars that shared the streets for several years.
Soviet war memorial in Treptower Park, Berlin, 1990 (4x5 film)
I had one brush with the Stasi when photographing Berlin in the '80s. My friend Anamarie Michnevich and I--both interested in early modernist architecture--were poking around East Berlin looking for a particular housing project. I was carrying my view camera. We were confused by the map we had--the housing didn't seem to be there--and suddenly I realized that we were standing adjacent a large complex of camera studded buildings. Suddenly, a voice called out and uniformed guards started approaching. We quickly retreated down some nearby steps into the subway, a train pulled in, and we were whisked away. Later, I found out that we had unwittingly stumbled upon the notorious Normannenstrasse headquarters of the East German secret police, the Stasi.
Aside from it's architectural importance, the Seagram Building (designed by Mies van der Rohe), has personal significance to me. When I graduated from Cooper Union and began photographing the Lower East Side, the first prints I ever sold were to the Seagram collection. Phyllis Lambert of the Bronfman family, which owned Seagram, was putting together a collection of materials--including photographs--to serve as the basis for the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Acting on her behalf was Richard Pare, a curator and architectural photographer, who I had studied with at Cooper. Richard, along with Joel Meyerowitz, who also taught at Cooper, influenced my ideas about photography, especially with regards to the view camera. The money I got from that initial sale kept the Lower East Side project alive and launched my career, such as it is. I remember walking into the Seagram Building with my portfolio--and a good deal of satisfaction.
Bergdorf Goodman/58th and Fifth Avenue
LVMH building and Tourneau shop on 57th Street
In recent years, architecture has gotten more adventurous in New York, though it is still a relatively conservative town compared to any number of European capitals. One of the buildings to break the ice in the late 90s was this small tower by Christian de Portzamparc, the French architect. Its folded curtain wall disrupts--without violating--the continuous masonry and stone of the north side of 57th Street.
Office reception overlooking Central Park (4x5 film)
I've been busy this week with three photo shoots, all in Midtown, and the follow-up scanning and color correcting that I usually do myself. The photograph above was taken 45 floors up overlooking Central Park.
Houston Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal It's a losing proposition writing anything about Jeff Wall at this point. The juggernaut of critical approbation along with Wall's own avalanche of supporting text is more than a puny photographer like me can withstand. I find myself standing on the corner of Houston and Sixth Avenue gazing up at the Jeff Wall billboard "Only at MoMA" and I feel weak and useless. Wall is a greater photographer than all others because his photographs aren't just photographs, but containers of the entire canon of western art. They were made in response to a crisis of conceptualism that stymied us all. Wall triumphed. The rest of us stumbled blindly in the street trying to find lost things, places, ideas, rather than reinventing the medium, turning the act of photography inside out, like he did, creating hermetically sealed environments of almost reality, hyperreality, staged reality, photographs about photography, frozen like the little explosion of milk referring to nothing and everything.
