New York/WTC

Ground Zero/WTC (digital)

Made another walk with my view camera down to Ground Zero/WTC. Construction continues mostly below ground focused especially on the transportation infrastructure. WTC 7 is the only finished building that replaces anything lost on 9/11, but eventually new towers will rise from what is still a giant hole in the ground.


Pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway (digital)

There is still no good place for tourists and visitors to advantageously view the entire WTC site. As a result, people wander about picking their way through a maze of fences and barriers. The ill-fated Deutsche Bank building remains shrouded in netting, but is slowly coming down.

Note: Thanks to Blogger being down again for uploading to ftp blog sites, I accidentally overwrote my last post. I'll try to re-up those photos later. Blogger's poor performance has greatly tarnished my previously high esteem for Google, the company that offers the service.

New York/Clinton

Somewhere in Soho just off Broadway (4x5 film)

Like many kids in the early 60s, I was a fan of John F. Kennedy. I kept a plaque in my bedroom with Kennedy's famous "ask not" quote embossed on it. He was the first president I knew, and his natural eloquence and character formed my understanding of who and what an American president was supposed to be. I was 9 years old when he was cut down by an assassin's bullet in Dallas.

I was 14 years old in 1968, the most tumultuous year, perhaps, in post war American history. I was young, but fully aware of what was going on--the civil rights struggle and the war in Vietnam. The murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy left me devastated and heartbroken, and I don't think I've ever really recovered. I remember poignantly Teddy Kennedy's eulogy delivered in St. Patrick's Cathedral, as deeply eloquent a tribute as has ever been written.

A few days ago Teddy Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and while one hopes for his recovery, I am already prepared for the worst.

We are in the middle of a dramatic and prolonged Democratic presidential campaign between the heir to Bill Clinton's two term presidency and, to many of us, the heir to the legacy of the Kennedy brothers. We all know the personal dangers associated with Barack Obama's candidacy as the first black man with a real chance to the highest office in the land. And we all know--and see--how messages of hope and idealism pose a threat to the status quo. There is an undercurrent of anger that lurks menacingly.

Yesterday Hillary Clinton raised the specter of assassination in an off hand reference to Bobby Kennedy, and how his campaign ran into June of 1968. When I read her comments and watched her deliver them on YouTube, I froze inside. She had invoked one of the darkest moments in American political history to justify the continuation of her campaign, knowing--surely--that in doing so, she was dipping, however gingerly, into a poisonous well of hatred.

Hillary Clinton's honor (and campaign) now hangs in tatters along with the legacy of Bill Clinton's presidency. It's over. Good riddance.

New York/Canal Street

Canal Street at Sixth Avenue and Thompson

Had a visitor yesterday from the Bay Area, architect friend David Kesler. I gave him a speed tour of a large chunk of lower Manhattan: the Bowery, the East Village, Lower East Side, across Soho to the area around Canal Street where it borders Tribeca.


David Kesler in front of the Storefront for Art and Architecture

New York/Dumbo

Under the Manhattan Bridge (digital)

First of all, a large international festival in New York dedicated to contemporary photography is a great idea. Second of all, locating it in Dumbo, the atmospheric neighborhood of warehouse and factory buildings beneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges is brilliant.

A few years ago, powerHouse Books, the photo book publisher moved to Dumbo from cramped quarters in Manhattan and created a spacious book store/gallery called the powerHouse Arena. Likewise, VII Photo Agency, representing photojournalists James Nachtwey and Lauren Greenfield, among others, located its NYC offices with accompanying book store and gallery in Dumbo. Combine these companies with the visionary real estate firm Two Trees, and the necessary synergy was in place to make an event like this possible.


Tobacco Warehouse (digital)

The festival was not, thankfully, another showcase of commercial galleries. Nor was it a "Whitney Biennial, " which has become so tiresome as a vehicle for curatorial excess that I go out of my way to avoid it. Four curators--you can't live without 'em--each put together thematic shows aimed at suggesting where contemporary photography is heading.

Well, actually, I didn't go for Tim Barber's more-the-merrier show of dozens of images all the same size, all the same weight, mix and match, stream of consciousness, grab bag of goodies, random musings, serendipitous connections, or as Barber puts it, an exquisite corpse. Give me more less is more, please.


Natalie Czech photo (digital)

I liked Lesley Martin's "Ubiquitous Image" even though, theoretically, I'm supposed to be a straight photography kind of person. Maybe it was the exhibition space, which was better lit and better organized than the others, or maybe it was the work itself. It was all art about photography, or making use of photography, or found photography, rather than photography, but I found much of it interesting, occasionally beautiful, and generally coherent. Natalie Czech's big Photoshop collages were particularly nice. Similarly, I liked the shredded strips of images by Joachim Schmid, non photographs comprised entirely of photographic images.


Michel Campeau photos (digital)

Martin's Parr's "New Typologies" should have interested me more, but I guess I'm a little burned out on the idea of typologies. Although there is a long photographic tradition behind this kind of work--think Blossveldt, Saunders, the Bechers, et al--I found myself wanting Parr's selected photographers to be less bloody systematic and more spontaneous. That said, I really liked Michel Campeau's beautiful/ugly images of stuff in traditional photographic darkrooms. Did we really work in places like this once? I wanted to like Jan Kempenaer's documentations of Soviet era monuments, but couldn't get past the Becher-induced trance. I like the Bechers, by the way. And if that's the way he wants to work, I wanted view camera detail rather than the slightly soft graininess of medium format. I enjoyed Sarah Pickering's pictures of explosions. Boom.


Simon Norfolk photos (digital)

Finally, Kathy Ryan's exhibit was harder for me to grasp thematically, and it was the most difficult space--St. Ann's Warehouse--to look at work. There were lectures and panel discussions going on in the theater located at the center of the space. I liked the two programs I went to, but the bustle of people coming and going didn't help the exhibition. Andreas Gefeller's large, probably beautiful prints were hurt the most because they were basically unlit. Although I am not opposed to Ryan's notion that many photographers take their cues from the other visual arts, I don't know if I really want to think this way when comparing Simon Norfolk's images of rocket installations and Horacio Salinas's images of discarded tires. Or Katherin Wolkoff's deer nests and Stephen Gill's crumpled paper. I couldn't follow, or didn't want to follow, the curator's thread through such disparate work. By the way, of all the work in the festival, I am probably most naturally attracted to Simon Norfolk's images of war torn landscapes. I'll look for a chance to write about him in the future.


Pizza restaurant in Dumbo (digital)

The over all theme of the festival was the future of photography. Given the extreme diversity of contemporary photography--from straight to staged, composed to found, reused to deauthorized--the future, as seen in this festival, remains uncertain, leading off in different directions. But certainly, photography is not, as some have asserted, a medium in decline.

New York/Limbo

Blogger is currently on the fritz for those of us on our own ftp servers. I have not been able to upload images for the past 24 hours or so.

So, please stand by.

UPDATE: After twiddling my thumbs in frustration that none of my photos were loading, I resorted to cutting and pasting code into the Blogger window, which did the trick. But lots of extra work.

UPDATE: It has now been several days that Blogger has been broken for those who do ftp publishing. That means that thousands of people are unable to upload images onto their blogs without the workaround mentioned above, which is less than easy. Google/Blogger has not responded to the deluge of complaints on their help website. This is a major black eye for a company that states in its corporate policy: "Focus on the user and all else will follow."

UPDATE: Blogger working again after long wait.

New York/Dumbo

Dumbo, Brooklyn (digital - Sigma DP1)

I spent a few hours each day, Saturday and Sunday, at the New York Photo Festival. I'll have a number of things to say about the festival later, but first I'd like to comment on a new camera I'm trying out. It's the Sigma DP1, a point and shoot camera with a full size Foveon sensor--the first camera this small to have such a large sensor.

I'm a little unsure how to characterize the pictures this camera produces. They are unlike any I've encountered before. Extremely rich, wide tonal range, and very sharp. But different in ways I can't yet put my finger on. The picture above was taken in Dumbo, Brooklyn on my way to the festival under a dead gray sky, a situation my Ricoh GR digital is hard pressed to handle. The skies would tend to wash out, or the foreground would lose color clarity, or clear definition between colors. Here, the sky holds weight, colors are true, and neutrals remain neutral.

The DP1 only produces images 2640 x 1760 pixels, which is small compared to the many digital cameras that pack a lot of pixels onto miniature chips. But these are RAW images, and certainly enough size for 8x10 prints, and possibly larger if the resolution is carefully interpolated up. Moreover, the Foveon sensor is a whole other animal, but you can look up what more tech oriented people have to say about it.

What we have here is a rather rarefied camera for serious photographers who want a pocket camera that will produce DSLR quality--or near DSLR--and who want a wide lens, don't care about zooms, and are more interested in image quality than megapixels. Could be the perfect blog, carry everywhere, camera for me.

New York/LES

Orchard Street (digital)

After shooting a building for a client in Midtown in the morning, I spent several hours with the view camera on the Lower East Side. I returned to a spot on Orchard Street that I had looked at previously without my camera, and set up a view with tenements and a new rather alien tower in the background. I realized later, that the tenement in the foreground, stripped of its stoop, is the location of a photograph I did in 1980.


Orchard Street, 1980 (4x5 film)

Orchard Street, while still full of shops, and generally much fixed up over 1980, is less vibrant than it once was. Back then, it was an intense island of commerce in the midst of an often scary neighborhood. Although, the street is still closed off to cars on Sundays, the street hawkers and those protecting the goods displayed on the sidewalk can be intimidating rather than inviting. At the same time, clubs, bars, and more fashionable shops are gradually pushing out the discount trade.


Ludlow Street (digital)

Nearby on Ludlow, opposite one of the most characteristic blocks of tenements on the Lower East Side, a new building rises on the base of an older structure. In this area, near the Tenement Museum, the city has placed historic bishop's crook light fixtures.


Rivington Street (digital)

On Rivington, I photographed a synagogue that has been converted to housing. This has happened all over the neighborhood. Though some have remained synagogues, others have been reconsecrated as churches.


M'Finda Kalunga Garden between Rivington and Delancey (digital)

I ended my walk at the M'Finda Kalunga Garden in Sarah D. Roosevelt Park between Rivington And Delancey Streets. I saw that my former building neighbor Bob Humber was inside the garden--he's a regular volunteer there--and he let me inside the gate. This garden was established in 1983, which makes it one of the oldest community gardens on the Lower East Side.

On the fence of the garden is an information sign stating that the adjacent playground was formerly the location of New York's African burial ground.

Dutch colonists brought the first Africans to the New Amsterdam colony in the late 1500s. By 1748, African-Americans, slave and free, made up 20% of the city's population. In addition to being banned from membership in churches, at best relegated to balconies and back pews, New York black residents endured curfews meeting prohibitions, and burial restrictions.

The graveyard was disinterred in the mid 19th century, and like most of the Lower East Side, tenements rose on the site. The tenements were eventually demolished, and a one block wide park was constructed from Houston Street down to Canal Street. In 1980 it was a fearful strip, entered by few but drug dealers and addicts. Today, it is an intensely used series of playgrounds with the M'Finda Kaunga garden as the only quiet oasis.

New York/Songwriting

David Massengill and Jack Hardy

Did some pictures yesterday for songwriters Jack Hardy and David Massengill who are doing a number of gigs together as the Folk Brothers (with a smirk). Jack has sometimes used an ancient typewriter as a symbol of his attitude toward writing songs--a craft rooted in old traditions, resistant to, though not situated wholly outside of, the modern world. I think the typewriters look a little like accordions in the photo.

David and Jack are two of the first people I met when I came to New York in 1977. David performs primarily on the dulcimer as unique accompaniment for his mostly narrative songs. He is, perhaps, best known for On the road to Fairfax County, which has been been recored by The Roches and Joan Baez. But that's just the place to get started on David's rich and varied collection of songs.

New York/E4th Street

East 4th Street and the Bowery (4x5 film)

The 4x5 version of the image posted earlier. Samuel Tredwell Skidmore House in foreground; new hotel tower by Carlos Zapata.

New York/Alex Harsley

Alex Harsely (digital)

Ran into Alex Harsley, the photographer, on Second Avenue yesterday. He nailed me with his cell phone, so I returned fire. Later, I went by his gallery/studio on East 4th Street with my son Brendan. Alex is busy with videos these days, but it's his remarkable still photography that interests me the most.


Muhammad Ali by Alex Harsley (digital)

Covering the walls of his tiny gallery space are dozens of images, held up by clothespins, made over the decades of New York scenes--especially the Lower East Side--with many chronicling African American culture. I snapped a piece of one wall showing several photos of Muhammad Ali. Who knows what else is in his archive. I can only only speculate. Drop by and visit. (67 E4th Street)


Brendan on the Bowery (digital)

New kicks.

New York/Houston Street

Houston Street and the Bowery (digital)

A recreated Keith Haring mural, Barack Obama, and Grand Theft Auto IV conjoin at Houston and Bowery.

I shot about 10 sheets of 4x5 film from several different angles with different arrangements of people and cars. The Obama poster is more prominent in some. It's probably the most photographed corner in New York at the moment, not that that has ever deterred me.

New York/Songwriting

Jack Hardy with songwriters at his apartment on Houston Street. (digital)

It's been a while since I wrote a song--something I've been doing since I was 20 years old--what with photography and family responsibilities taking up my time. Last Monday I went Jack Hardy's weekly songwriter meeting at his battered tenement apartment on Houston Street in the Village. I went with a new song to premiere and subject to the critical ears of a roomful of writers of all levels of accomplishment.

Lyrics don't always read so well on the page, but I think these hold up:

underground

the man in the coat looks uncomfortably hot
he prays from a book he rocks back and forth
the train rumbles through the rock blasted earth
eyes shift in sockets there's a bulge in a pocket
ipods play private reveries

chorus:

roll on roll on subterranean train
through the blind tunnel of fate
roll on roll on with a fearful freight
if you see something say something
before it's too late

school kids swarm in and swing from the poles
a mariachi band plays besame mucho
a family from somewhere not anywhere near here
clings to their map of the world underground
ipods play private reveries

down in the glare air conditioned hades
fire and brimstone in an unattended package
each sudden lurch and with each random search
eyes pry deeper into unattended musings
ipods play private reveries

The "see something say something" bit will be familiar to riders of the New York City subway. It's an ad campaign calling for vigilance on the part of the public, but many of us regard it as furthering an atmosphere and politics of fear.


Jack's apartment is lined with photos of the famous and almost famous. (digital)

The song went over well at Jack's, but there were many good songs that night. It's not always that way. It can be tedious at times, but then, without warning, the most remarkable compositions emerge.

On Friday I went to the Postcrypt Coffeehouse, a basement music venue at Columbia University. Tim Robinson, a frequent contributor to the Monday evening meetings at Jack's, was host, and his guests were Suzanne Vega and Richard Julian. The three of them took turns playing songs--whatever seemed appropriate at the moment--and the audience, most of whom didn't know that Suzanne and Richard were appearing, were enthralled.

I've known Suzanne for many years, and at this point, I guess she's one of my oldest friends. Richard I met some years later when he began coming to Jack's and hanging out with our circle of songwriters. Richard was great then, but his writing and performing have matured and developed like nothing I've ever seen. His songs are accessible, but also sophisticated, witty, and profound. Where many of us struggle with our little melodies and chord progressions, Richard does things musically I can only begin to understand. He's seeing some well-deserved success these days--Norah Jones has covered a couple of his songs--and the Times has written him up more than once. He used to sing back-up vocals for me.

Tim Robinson I met more recently, also at Jack's. He's an extraordinarily literate songwriter who is recognized by people like Suzanne and Richard, but still struggles to find a wider audience. The record industry no longer (if it ever did) shows interest in people like Tim, and he, like many others, are left to record on their own and distribute their music in alternate ways. I expect him to endure and prosper as an artist, regardless of the trappings of success. Look him up.

New York/Color

Third Avenue and St. Marks Place (digital)


Fifth Avenue and 57th Street (digital)


Museum of Modern Art (digital)