New York/LES

New York Marble Cemetery (digital)

One of the oldest cemeteries in the city lies hidden within the block bounded by the Bowery, East 3rd, East 2nd, and Second Avenue. We walked by last Sunday, and the gate was open, so we went in. There are no traditional graves or headstones. Under the grass are vaults, and the names of the deceased are on stone tablets set in the walls of the cemetery. In many places the walls are crumbling, and despite the landmark status of the site, it remains a vulnerable piece of Lower East Side history.

New York/Princeton

Historical Studies/Social Science Library • Wallace Harrison (digital)

While photographing a new building at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, I walked around the campus at lunch time, and took snapshots of two architectural gems, one by Robert Geddes (see earlier post and the other by Wallace K. Harrison.

Historical Studies/Social Science Library (digital)


Historical Studies/Social Science Library (digital)

The two groupings of buildings are directly adjacent to each other--the Harrison designed Historical Studies/Social Science Library was completed in 1964, and the Geddes complex a few years later. But stylistically, they are further apart. Both the brutalism of Geddes and the lighter/whiter neo-classicim of Harrison (and other architects like Phillip Johnson and Edward Durell Stone) were reactions to the dominate Miesian school of architecture.


Historical Studies/Social Science Library (digital)

One rarely finds the two styles side by side as they would seem to be incompatible. Here in Princeton, however, there is an architectural dialog between the two schools of thought, brought together in part by the integration of landscape and architecture.

See the post below for the Geddes buildings.

New York/Princeton

Institute for Advanced Study • Princeton, New Jersey (digital)

I've been down to Princeton a number of times to photograph a new building extension at the Institute for Advanced Study, a research center near Princeton University. It is, perhaps, best known for its former illustrious faculty member, Albert Einstein.


Dining Hall • designed by Robert Geddes (digital)

I haven't presented my pictures to the client yet, so I'll hold off showing them for now. But while there I walked around the IAS campus and discovered remarkable buildings by architects Robert Geddes and Wallace K. Harrison. Harrison, part of the firm Harrison, Abramovitz & Harris, which designed the Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center and a number of bland international style skyscrapers in Manhattan in the '60s, here created something sublime. Pictures to come.


West Building • Robert Geddes (digital)

Geddes designed a dining hall and adjacent academic building with birch garden in between in a style that is commonly referred to (unfortunately) as brutalism. The term has more to do with the use of rough concrete than of anything pejoratively brutal, but the public has readily attached the "brutal" misnomer to these often unloved buildings. The Geddes complex of buildings, however, is a relatively unknown masterpiece melding hard structure with soft landscape.


Dining Hall • Robert Geddes (digital)


West Building • Robert Geddes (digital)

These pictures, and those that follow, were made on the fly while breaking for lunch, not necessarily in the best light, and no interiors--the dining hall interior is spectacular. While continuing to use the 4x5 view camera for most of my assignment work and personal projects, I am now using the wonderful new Sigma DP1 as my go anywhere pocket camera.

New York/Sheepshead Bay

Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn (digital)

Another drive-by photo from the car window.

New York/Ground Zero

Ground Zero

Driving back from a shoot in Brooklyn I popped out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and drove up the West Side Highway along the construction cranes in the pit of Ground Zero. The car I had rented had a sunroof, and I looked up and grabbed this shot through the glass.

New York/Eminent Domain

The New York Public Library (digital)

My visit to the New York Public Library to see Eminent Domain, a photography exhibition about New York City, started off well enough. Walking in to the building I noted that "flash photography" was not allowed, but was happy that I would be able to take pictures inside. I walked through the entrance to the exhibit and began reading the introductory text:

As the proposed regulations on photographing in New York City illustrate, photography is often subject to such private/public complications. Indeed, issues of privacy and image rights have troubled photography throughout its history; with the shift to digital media and the increasing regulation of public space (both literal and virtual), these issues are becoming even more complex. A photograph, after all, is a transaction between the private and the public that is negotiated through the taking of an image—a kind of eminent domain of the visual realm.

Stephen C. Pinson (curator)

Having read the text, I wandered about the dimly lit gallery waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. It's a beautiful room, and the exhibit itself was nicely designed, but the darkness was problematic. The photographs deserve a brighter, cleaner, more neutral environment.


Eminent Domain • Ethan Levitas photos (digital)

As I leaned my camera against a column to do the image above, a guard ambushed me, barking loudly, "No photography allowed! I told you when you came in. Put away the camera." My 9-year-old son was a bit shocked to see his father reprimanded with such harshness. I had unwittingly committed the crime of taking a picture of an exhibition relating to the increasing "regulation of public space (both literal and virtual)." Oops.

Still a little shaken by the reprimand, I looked around the exhibit. Nothing in the show itself had quite the impact of the guard's presumption of authority over the act of photography. The concept of eminent domain and the myriad implications of the phrase should have resulted in an exhibit of challenging work that addressed the blurring of public and private realm, not to mention the way in which government employs eminent domain for purposes that seem to make public good and private profit interchangeable.


Thomas Holton

Jacob Riis famously photographed the living conditions of immigrants in their tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His pictures were intended to shock the pampered consciences of the respectable class of Manhattanites. Riis's high moral dudgeon achieved results in the social sphere, but one perceives little empathy in his pictures. His flash powder explosions of light remain powerful and pitiless depictions of poverty. In comparison, Thomas Holton's well-intentioned pictures of family life in Chinatown seem too respectful, too careful of the relationship built up between photographer and subjects. I found myself wanting something more intrusive, personally riskier. I like the photo above the best because, for once, the interaction between participants is openly acknowledged.


Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard's square format images of Lower East Side garment businesses and the like were attractively nostalgic, but too casual, off-hand. It's hard to believe the accompanying text refers to these images:

Although centered on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, the completed project (an archive of about 500 images) captures the wide-ranging forces of globalization, with specific attention to the route and final destination of New York’s castoff clothing in the contemporary rag trade. As such, Analogue is not only a meditation on the costs of urban redevelopment, but an exploration of the replacement of local markets by a global economy. As its name suggests, Analogue is also an elegy of sorts to a long-standing tradition of documentary photography, from Atget to Walker Evans, which Leonard sees passing with the onset of digital photography.


Betinna Johae

Bettina Johae's ambitious project in which she traveled the periphery of the city's five boroughs floats in limbo between a conceptual piece and a collection of individual images. Some of the photographs are mounted on the wall on movable pages that can be leafed through, and others are shown on small video monitors. The mounted photos are not well lit, and the considerably brighter back-lit images are pixellated even at small size. The website is the best way to see her work.


Ethan Levitas

Ethan Levitas's subway cars are the strongest images in the show, each train car (or parts of two cars) photographed at the same distance capturing people framed in the windows. We see faces, backs of heads, gestures, flecks of color and pattern--people in public, but suspended in moments of private isolation.


Reiner Leist

Reiner Leist has photographed the scene outside his studio window almost every day for over 10 years using an 8x10 view camera. The images are murky and hold little detail despite the 8x10 format. Different household objects are seen in the foreground on different days. During the making of the series, the Twin Towers disappear. The book costs $85.

New York has undergone historic transformation in recent years, first rising from financial collapse and the rubble of the '70s and '80s, and then, at a quickening pace, rising from the ashes of September 11. There have been profound dislocations of neighborhoods, while the population has continued to increase, diversify, and stratify. New York careers forward in the midst of a new gilded age, an era of mega real estate projects designed by rock star architects held aloft on the ether of money while war grinds on far away in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Whatever the merits of the various photographers' work, too little of this complex dynamism can be found in the exhibition at the Public Library.

New York/Red Hook

Red Hook, Brooklyn

Without comment.

New York/Red Hook

Red Hook, New York

I'm shooting some apartments for an architect in Red Hook, the waterfront neighborhood just below Carroll Gardens. It's a pretty gritty environment, but fascinating--docks, factories, lofts, little houses, big housing projects, and coming soon. Ikea. It would be gentrified already, but it's notoriously hard to get to. No subway.

New York/Reconnaissance

Red Hook, New York

There's an article in the Guardian from a few days ago linking the increasing harassment of photographers to the general fear of terrorism. I think there's some truth to that. The author also relates it to movie plots in which terrorists seem always to be casing the joint with a camera.

I think the latter point is a bit overstated, but I do believe that there is an increased climate of distrust in the air--certainly post-911--but I believe it started before that. Photographers have become psychological scapegoats, the victims of heightened vigilance, even paranoia. Ironically, this climate has emerged at the same that photography has been greatly democratized by digital cameras, websites, flickr, and other online means of disseminating images. The world is awash in pictures; yet we fear the power of photographs more than ever.


Red Hook, Brooklyn

As one who has experienced first hand what it's like to try taking pictures in a communist country, I greatly sympathize with the quote below posted on the blog the Online Photographer.

I remember reading an article about East Germany in _National Geographic_ back in the early '70s, in which the author describes being harassed by the Volkspolizei for having taken a photograph of something he "shouldn't" have--a bridge or some other public edifice, as I recall. I remember thinking "Boy, I'm sure glad that sort of thing can't happen in the USA!"

Just a few years ago, some colleagues of mine from Germany were taking in the sights along the Mall in Washington DC, taking pictures of the grand public edifices. Apparently they took a photograph of something they "shouldn't" have, as they were stopped and questioned twice by police, and were obliged to delete several shots from their digital cameras.

It was a nice country, while it lasted. Perhaps it isn't too late to take it back.

New York/MVRDV

Wozocos • MVRDV • Amsterdam

For those of you who saw the architecture edition of the New York Times magazine and who are looking for photographs of MVRDV buildings, here's a good place to start.

Silodam
Wozocos
Ypenburg houses

New York/Prohibited Sight

Robber Barons by Studio Job--corporate greed in bronze (digital)

One of the primary purposes of this journal is to chart my course through the city--and elsewhere--and comment, where appropriate, on the things I see, neighborhoods I walk through, architecture I encounter, exhibits I visit. Sometimes I go out with my 4x5 view camera, and take snapshots with my digital camera on the side--a sort of comment on my own activity. Other times I just shoot off the cuff with the digital camera, going back, to some extent, to the 35mm street photography style of my student days.

The world I perambulate is becoming less and less a free space for visual commentary--meaning photography is forbidden. It's an insidious incremental crimping of the public domain, and there are now all sorts of places that are ambiguous public/private zones where various kinds of behavior and speech can be regulated.


Taxidermy by Melissa Dixson, wall paper by the Timorous Beasties (digital)

The pictures above was taken in Moss, an extraordinary design store in Soho that is as much gallery as shop. In fact, the current work on display featuring Dutch artist-designers was funded by the government of the Netherlands. Much of the work shown is political in nature, and like most political art, it is consigned to a gallery world populated primarily by supposedly high-minded wealthy individuals. The display above juxtaposes a grouping of idealized stuffed foxes cavorting against a wallpaper background created by the Timorous Beasties depicting "victory" in the Iraq war with bloody drips and splotches. To the victor the spoils.

After casually taking the preceding photos, I was informed by the shop staff that photography was not allowed. This being a private business, I quickly acceded to their demand, but I did ask the sales person, why? As is so often the case, she didn't actually know. There may, in fact, be a good reason--at least from the shop's point of view--but from my position as a blogger, a photographer, a (granted) self-appointed visual critic, my intentions have been stifled.

Now, on to the "public" library...

New York/Tribeca

A telephone building in Tribeca (digital)

Scattered around Manhattan, particularly lower Manhattan, there are a number of telephone skyscrapers, buildings that were built principally to hold switching equipment and the like. One especially unlovely blank walled monolith near the Brooklyn Bridge is likely to be transformed into a glass windowed office tower.


Western Union building in Tribeca designed by Ralph Walker (digital)


Barclay-Vesey building designed by Ralph Walker (digital)

Walking downtown through Tribeca the other day I encountered several phone buildings designed by Ralph Walker, the great Art Deco architect, which prove that such structures need not be bad architectural neighbors. The Barclay-Vesey building, regarded as the first Art Deco skyscraper, was badly damaged on 9/11 and has been fully restored.