New York/Fly's Eye Dome

Fly's Eye Dome by Buckminster Fuller (digital)

New York has much great public sculpture of the traditional kind--generals on horseback and solitary figures standing proudly against the sky or beneath a canopy of trees. But much less of the modern kind. At least not permanently installed.

What we have instead--and it's probably a good thing--are temporary visitations of new public art. No doubt you have heard about or seen New York City Waterfalls by Olafur Eliasson, a public art project on the scale of, if not as popular as, Christo's Gates. These mega pieces, The Gates included, have the difficulty of competing with the enormous scale and spectacle of New York itself, the skyline, the bridges, Central Park, and so on.

More enjoyable to me are the smaller installations that one comes upon serendipitously. Some are designed as site specific, and others are dropped in because they fit. One such object is a Fly's Eye Dome by Buckminster Fuller. Designed as the prototype for a possible home, it sits in La Guardia Place directly in front of a bronze walking and clapping statue of Fiorello La Guardia, former mayor of New York. It looks a lot like a giant soccer ball.


Fly's Eye Dome by Buckminster Fuller (digital)

Fuller's domes--equally organic and technological--have always been popular notions, despite never really taking off as practical schemes. Fuller's utopian optimism worked better in the 1960s, perhaps, though Fly Eye's Dome is from 1983, the year he died. But with the growing realization that the planet is rapidly going down the tubes thanks to our excesses, we will need all the crackpot visionaries and humanists--like Fuller--we have to help pull us through.

New York/LES

(Rose/Fausty)

After working on the new incarnation of the Lower East Side project for a number of years--not as intensively as I'd like, but gradually building up a sizable body of work--I decided to put it all together in book form using Blurb, the online DIY book publisher. As I began the process, downloading the software, thinking about the design, etc., I discovered that Blurb was having a book contest. With a first prize of $25,000 and lots of attention for the winner and the runners up as well. Deadline fast approaching. So, without much ado, I threw myself into a four day 14 hour a day marathon and designed, sequenced, and wrote the text of a 200 page photo book simply titled The Lower East Side--with 1980 and 2008 on either side of the title.


Introductory text (Rose/Fausty)

As you can see from the cover image above, I elected to use a rather brash magenta color as background, and it is used throughout the book as accent color. Although the photographs are all conventionally placed on white pages, I have pushed the graphic design forward a bit more than is typical for fine art books. The text, while readable, acts as part of the design, and the years of the photographs are clearly visible above the images, which is important, since the back and forth play between then and now is what the book is all about.


Typical double page (Rose)

Five years ago when I assembled a book dummy for The Lost Border, my Iron Curtain project, I worked with a graphic designer in Amsterdam who used magenta and deviated in various ways from the conservative design philosophy employed by most photo book publishers. Needless to say, when the proposal was finally accepted by a publisher, they shot down the design, and we went with a nice, but fairly tame, layout. Since this new Blurb book is not subject to anyone else's design sensibility, I have opted for the return of magenta, a non-neutral, but also non-natural color. Meaning that it does not tend to blend or pick up colors from the photographs. It remains a separate, even alien, element.

The important thing, however, is the content of the book. The first phase of the project was done in 1980 when fellow Cooper Union student Ed Fausty and I photographed the neighborhood with a 4x5 view camera. After that, we moved on to our own individual approaches to photography. I did various projects, most notably, documenting the Iron Curtain border and Berlin Wall. I lived in Amsterdam for 12 years, though keeping an apartment just off the Bowery. The following text taken from the book explains some of my motivation for returning to the project:

On September 11, 2001 I was in Amsterdam. The phone rang, and it was a friend from Berlin telling me in an urgent voice to turn on the TV. I then watched in horror as the attack on the World Trade Center unfolded and the Twin Towers collapsed. A week later I was back in New York on one of the first flights from overseas.

Although I made photographs of the impromptu memorial in Union Square Park, and took my view camera down to lower Manhattan mixing with crowds jostling for a glimpse of the WTC aftermath, I began thinking about a more serious response to events, one that would take a longer view of the impact on the city and beyond. Eventually I came to the conclusion I should return to where I had begun--the Lower East Side--the place where so many Americans traced their roots. The old neighborhood tucked beneath the bridges lying at the feet of the pinnacles of power would serve as a barometer of change and continuity.

Sometime in 2003 I restarted the Lower East Side project, working again with a 4x5 view camera, but on my own this time. From the beginning it was clear that this would not be a simple before/after take on the neighborhood. Before and after books, however fascinating, are usually one dimensional, and by definition subservient to the original set of photographs. While keeping an eye on the earlier photographs done with Ed Fausty, I wanted to rediscover the place with fresh eyes, with the perspective of time, change, and history.

What I have put together is a before/after book that looks forward as much as it looks back. I've mixed the photographs throughout with pairings and multi-page sequences of images based on numerous criteria--geography, composition, points-of view, similarities, contrasts, coincidences, religious and ethnic iconography, etc. What I like about it is that it's a book about the Lower East Side that does not get mired in "ye olde" neighborhood nostalgia. Nor is it a book about any one view of this often controversial place. Others have done that. This book is about the urban fabric we all inhabit, share and sometimes fight over.


(Rose/Fausty)

Unfortunately, however, it isn't a book yet except on my computer and in a couple of copies I'm having printed by Blurb. I've entered it into the contest--winners announced in early September--and I hope to show it around to publishers, galleries, and museums. At the moment there appears no venue for this project in lower Manhattan. No gallery or institution suitable, willing, or whatever. But stay tuned...

Update:

Here is the link to my book page on Blurb. Be sure to look at the preview feature of Blurb. You'll only see the first fifteen pages of the book, but it's pretty cool.

New York/Houston Street

Houston and Bowery (4x5 film)

A 4x5 variation of an earlier digital shot. This one with Hummer.

Williamsburg, Virginia

Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drums, 1967 (CW photo)
I am fourth from the left in the front next to George Carroll the corps leader.

On Friday and Saturday I traveled with my family to Williamsburg, Virginia for the 50th anniversary of the Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drums. I was a member from 1964 to 1972. The fife and drum corps was established in 1958, and its first drum major was George Carroll, a master drummer and historian of 18th century martial music.


Musical Tattoo on the Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1967 (CW newspaper clipping)
At the last minute I was handed the mace (drum major's stick) and led the corps in its performance with the Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps, the Marine Corps Band, and the Air Force Pipe Band. I was 13 at the time.

I joined at 9 years of age, took up the fife, and quickly rose through the ranks, which were based on instrument proficiency. We performed throughout the year in Colonial Williamsburg, and during my tenure, played for presidents Johnson and Nixon as well as many other world leaders and dignitaries. We were paid for what we did, and my nine years savings helped cover much of my college education.


George Carroll, the first CW Fife and Drum leader, and
Mark Riemer, fifer, on left.

Some 250 alumni of the Fifes and Drums returned to Williamsburg for the 50th anniversary, which featured performances by us and the current corps preceding the fireworks display on the 4th of July, and a parade down the Duke Gloucester Street the next day. Thousands of cheering people thronged the street and watched the performances given on Market Square by the three assembled alumni corps and the junior and senior corps of the present fifes and drums.


The crowd watching one of the corps enter the field.


From the ranks of the alumni corps as the present day senior corps performs.

Being a part of the CW Fifes and Drums was a life shaping experience, and provided lessons in excellence, leadership, and discipline. These are oft repeated clichés, of course, but having been at the pinnacle of something unique and rarefied, it has been--for me--impossible over the years to measure achievement on any other scale. Everything I have endeavored to do since has been informed by that early experience and by the relationships forged in the corps

Senior corps members posing for photographs.


My son Brendan and wife Renée behind the rope line.

The festivities ended with a banquet in the Virginia Room of the Williamsburg Lodge, a place I had performed in many times--now newly rebuilt. I was seated next to George Kusel, who worked on the staff of the corps for several years, and who provided much needed leadership for the fifers--George Carroll was foremost a drummer.


George Kusel in the alumni ranks

He was also an avid photographer, which interested me, having recently watched a National Geographic photographer at work photographing Colonial Williamsburg. With George's encouragement, I purchased my first 35mm slr, a Nikkormat (made by Nikon), a somewhat pricey camera for a kid, but something I could afford thanks to the money I earned with the corps. And as they say, the rest is history.

Chincoteague, Virginia

Abandoned gas station near Chincoteague, Virginia (digital)

It's a six hour drive down here from New York along the New Jersey Turnpike, and then Route 13 through Delaware and Maryland. Much of the landscape along 13 has been ruined by an excess of strip malls, fast foods, and gas stations. One wonders where this is all headed as gas prices edge above $4 a gallon.


Cheap cigarettes on Route 13 (digital)

Off the main road the landscape is largely unchanged, however, and further south on 13 there are vestiges of the earlier roadscape before the big chains came to dominate.

New York/Chincoteague, Virginia

From our hotel balcony • Chincoteague, Virginia (digital)

Headed south for a week's vacation. Chincoteague, Virginia. A scruffy fishing village adjacent to Assateague Island with its beach and wild ponies.