Over the years I've made many photographs of Amsterdam, but few of them show the beautiful historic center of the city. On the one hand, the old center of Amsterdam is the focus of the city still thick with shops, small businesses and museums, along with tourists. On the other hand, it is the least vital part of the city in that it is largely a cityscape frozen in time, small in scale, expensive, and less adaptable to either the pursuits of corporate big business or the individual enterprise of artists. So, I have tended to concentrate on more far-flung locales, from the immigrant neighborhoods in the west of the city to the office ghettos bordering the A10 ring highway. These areas have none of the charm of the central canal belt, but on the periphery of the city, they exhibit the raw edges of modern Dutch society.
Today I walked to the ferry dock behind Central Station and took the boat to the NDSM shipyard, once a bustling industrial complex, now a hodge podge of artists and artisans occupying the cavernous halls where ships were built and repaired. It is at once desolate and busy with virtually every part of its decrepit infrastructure put to some use. It is, alas, all destined to be transformed into a high tech center for new media, though its primary structures will be preserved and some of the artists will have space to continue their work.
The specific goal of my visit today was to photograph a colorful colony of stacked containers just beyond the ferry dock on the north side of the Ij, Amsterdam's principle waterway. The ferry makes the trip briskly in about 10 minutes passing my apartment building, designed by the architects MVRDV, which intentionally evokes the image of stacked shipping containers.
Student Housing
Unlike American universities where dormatories are provided to house students, Dutch schools rarely offer living accomodations. Because the housing market in Amsterdam is so tight, students are increasingly unble to find suitable places to live. So, temporary pre-fab housing has been created in various places to serve swelling enrollment to the University of Amsterdam and other local institutions.
The container village adjacent to the NDSM grounds is a strange sight. Built on the rubble of the former industrial terrain, corrugated steel boxes are stacked three stories high with perforated metal stairs and bridges providing circulation. The only interiors are the dorm rooms themselves. The wind and damp flows freely through the complex, a futuristic dystopia, or perhaps, an expression of extreme cool.
Left NY with unfinished business on the ground. Got bumped up to business class, which made the trip less arduous, but it looks like I'm heading back to New York for a very short stay to take care of things. Cashing in some frequent flyer miles to make the trip. Will hang around Amsterdam for a couple of days.
Had dinner on Wednesday with my friends Art Presson and Eve Kessler at Lucien, a quaint French restaurant on 1st Avenue near Houston. Excellent food. I know Art and Eve from the International Center of Photography where I worked part time while a student at Cooper Union and for a number of years after graduating. Art designed and the installed exhibitions at ICP's old location on the Upper East Side. I was part of the crew. Eve also worked there part time, and then went off to Cornell to study law. She is now an attorney at the Legal Aid Society. At some point in this chronology she and Art were married. They have an exceptional photography collection, including several of my prints, which is an honor. Art is now a landscape architect, and is in charge of the grounds of the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
With my camera on location (photo: Kim Sly)
On Thursday I photographed an office interior for TSC Design Associates. Kim Sly, who is marketing director of TSC accompanied me and my assistant. Kim has worked for three different clients of mine, so we've known each other for quite a while. The shoot went well, the highlight of which was when I perched above a workstation to get a view of a conference room. The office space was for Light Reading, a company in business media and telecommunications.
Yesterday, I had lunch with Cervin Robinson at his apartment on the Upper West Side. It's in a columned pre-war building just off Broadway, rambling and--well--messy. Conversation usually takes place in the kitchen. We talked about Cervin's proposal to do a book on the "photography of place." Cervin is an architectural photographer who, like Richard Pare, has been involved in editorial projects, and writing about architecture and photography. His book Architecture Transformed, A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present is a classic, alas, now out of print.
Recently, Cervin published some of my Lower East Side pictures in Places, a magazine where he is an editorial consultant. Cervin's own photographs have appeared in numerous books and publications, sometimes illustrating specific architectural styles or the work of individual architects, others times more loosely about the urban landscape. I have always admired the directness and purity of his work--it is less about self-expression, and more about the object, the building, the place.
For my part, I talked about my desire to photograph mega churches around the U.S., a project I am currently calling "the new religious landscape." Mega churches are a mostly suburban phenomenon, and their architecture shares much in common with shopping malls, multiplexes, and big box stores. Sometimes, old shopping centers or theaters have been converted into churches. I am interested in and worried about this sprawling landscape. While the traditional New England town grew around a tall-spired white clapboard church, the new suburbs (or exurbs) spiral about multiple nodes, the mega church campus being but one.
On my way to the lab today I stopped at the Museum of Modern Art and saw the John Szarkowski show. Szarkowski is the former curator of the MoMA's photography department, and a photographer as well. During his 29 years at the museum, he brought photography fully into the mainstream of modern art. His embrace of color photography was particularly important-most notably the William Eggleston exhibition in 1976. Although I did not see the exhibit at the time, I was aware of it, and it played a significant role in my decision to begin shooting color. Szarkowski was curator when the museum first bought some of my photographs for the collection.
His own photographs are in black and white. The earliest were often architectural studies, but later he focused more on nature and rural landscapes. The photographs are always beautifully conceived and composed, well-made technically, but perhaps, a little too controlled for my taste.
At the lab I ran into Richard Pare, who was one of my teachers at Cooper Union back in the late '70s. At that time, Richard had recently headed up a multi-photographer documentation of courthouses around the U.S. He was in the process of purchasing work for the Seagram collection, which became the basis for the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. When I began shooting the Lower East Side in 1980, Richard purchased a number of prints of that work, which provided much needed money to complete the project.
Since then, Richard has concentrated on his own photography. He is currently preparing an exhibit and book of his photographs of early modernist architecture in Moscow. It was very good to see Richard again after an interval of at least 10 years.
At the end of the day, I dragged myself out into the cold to do a dusk shot of the Sunshine Theater and Yonah Schimmel's, the famous knish bakery. I had already photographed this row of buildings during the daytime, but wanted to get it in the evening. The Sunshine Theater, now an movie arthouse with a modern glass extension, is a beautiful old survivor from the days of Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side. It was brutal standing in the wind and cold, and I barely succeeded in making a photograph.
CODE layout Four of my photographs of the Lower East Side will soon appear in CODE, a Dutch magazine on street fashion and art. Think skateboarding, hip hop, urban jungle attire. They've done a very nice job with the photographs.
Friday, I photographed an office space in Soho. The shoot went deep into the night--about 3am. The office was a product branding company called Anthem. It was designed by Charles Thanhauser (TEK Architects), who I've worked with for many years. The space was relatively small, but there was losts of design to work with.
Anthem
On Saturday, after recovering from the night before, I navigated over to Dumbo, Brooklyn to attend the opening of a curated group show called Mind the Gap. According to the invitation: "Mind the Gap examines the residual spaces of cities..." I was there to see the work of Elizabeth Felicella, an architectural photographer, who I knew had been photographing around JFK and LaGuardia airports. Her photographs were presented as an artist's book with the pages folded out accordian-like on a long table. Not having seen her work before I was surprised to find that it was in black and white--everybody shoots color these days--and happy to be looking at beautifully made prints that were not attempting to dominate one's senses through large scale or saturated colors. The pictures were of neighborhoods around the airports as well as indeterminate wasteland and watery landscapes.
Elizabeth Felicella Smack Mellon gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn
Afterwards, I went to dinner with friends and had a pleasant conversation with Alex Villar, one of the artists in the show. My second Dumbo/Brooklyn expedition in one week.
Apparently a sidewalk shed is going up around St. Brigid's church on Avenue B. Is demolition imminent? See earlier post: Amsterdam/New York
Yesterday, I scouted an interior in the AT&T building on lower Sixth Avenue, an art deco behemoth, monolithic, but well-detailed. I am most fond of the antennas on the roof, a new feature of the building, which have a Jetsons retro modern look. The lobby is classic deco with a giant tiled map of the world, and mosaics depicting the glory of telecommunications. The lobby can be visited without hindrance.
Later I headed for DUMBO in Brooklyn to see a photograhy exhibit by my friend James Shanks. To get to his quiet, graphically precise work, I had to pass through a series of large prints by Seth Thompson. These colorful interiors of a Mexican village were marred by poor printing. They seemed overly saturated and harsh for the nature of the subject, and the prints were unnecessarily large. Nelson Hancock Gallery
We had dinner at nearby Grimaldi's, a coal-fired oven pizza place of some reknown. Fortunately, we were early enough to beat the usual waiting in line out front. Grimaldi's
I spent about 4 hours on the street today photographing the Lower East Side. In 1980 I worked in collaboration with Ed Fausty--he and I took the pictures together using a view camera--but this time around I am on my own. I first walked to Rivington Street to see the demolition of the synagogue that has caused such a stir. People, alone or in groups, stopped and stared at what seems universally regarded as an unmitigated disaster. I took a picture with the view camera, but wasn't pleased with the light. Maybe a cloudy day, or late in the day will be better.
From there I walked down to Delancey Street taking in the new Lower East Side skyline punctuated by the hotel Thor, and Blue, the apartment building designed by Bernard Tschumi, currently under construction. In the photo above you can see the scene with my view camera on its tripod. It was a beautiful day with clouds scudding rapdily across the sky. Rather blustry, but very crisp and clear.
After lunch at a favorite café on Orchard Street, I walked through the projects on Grand Street and the Vladek Houses further to the south. I've always felt that these areas were underrepresented in my pictures. The projects comprise a large area of the Lower East Side, but because of their scale and relatively dead surroundings, I've tended to avoid them. But today, I took several pictures that I think do some justice to those areas. The Vladek Houses are rigorously modernist in concept, and despite precious little architectural detailing, create a very strong presence. The grounds around them are also well-maintained, tree-shaded, and to my eye, quite lovely.
Vladek Houses
I then walked to Corlears Hook, a sharp bend on the East River, once a slum and dock area. Some believe the word "hooker" originated as a description of the denizens of this neighborhood. The tenements and warehouses were cleared years ago by city planner Robert Moses, and replaced with the Vladek Houses, some other large apartment projects, and Corlears Hook Park. In 1980 the park was rundown and desolate as was the bandshell across the bridge spanning the FDR Drive, which was covered with graffiti Nowadays, it is all in good shape, though very quiet on a cold March day.
I left amsterdam for New York on Sunday. Wintry weather, passing snow showers, chilly damp, gave way to early Spring in New York. I took a taxi to my apartment, grabbed my guitar, and headed to the 11th Street Bar in the East Village for a benefit to help save St. Brigid's church on nearby Avenue B. The Catholic archdiocese wants to tear down the church, built in 1848, to make way for more profitable use. In the 19th century, St. Brigid's was a focus of the Irish immigrant community, which had made it's way to New York to escape famine and sectarian violence. Today, a small, mostly Latino, congregation keeps the church alive.
Many years ago I wrote a song called St. Brigid's. Here is the sound file. The chorus goes like this:
the bricks fall upon us all by st. brigid's the church bells chime and the landlords and the warlords by st. brigid's they bide their time
I also have a photograph of St. Brigid's from 1980 when I was photographing the Lower East Side with fellow photographer Ed Fausty. Today, I am photographing the neighborhood anew. You can see those pictures here.
Anyway, the benefit went well. I played my St. Brigid's song and two others, and hung around for about two hours. The crowd was a cross-section of the neighborhood, all ages, a smattering of old Lower East Side activists, and some of the current church congregation. I have no idea whether the church building can be saved. A synagogue on Rivington Street was lost to the wrecking ball just a few weeks ago.
