Walking down the Bowery one comes across all kinds of stuff displayed on the streets. Between Houston and Delancey it's the restaurant supply business with stainless steel cooking equipment being cleaned on the sidewalk, bulky pizza ovens and refrigerator units hoisted by forklifts on and off trucks. Chairs and bar stools are stacked in front of storefronts, and even decorating bric-a-brac is available. The way things are going, however, this raw working Bowery is doomed.
The Bowery
As usual, I am working with the 4x5 view camera, and these images were made with a small digital camera to preview what I'm doing and encourage a somewhat different way of looking at things.
Back in New York after a less than smooth re-entry. I forgot my keys and cell phone, and by a miracle was able to get my assistant Chris to meet me at my apartment with his set of extra keys. The weather has been beautiful since arriving, and I got out with my camera for another walk through the Lower East Side. I began close by on the Bowery. More pictures to come...
There are a number of things I will miss leaving Amsterdam, but none more than this apartment in the building called the Silodam, which was designed by the Dutch architects MVRDV. It sits on an earthen pier, also called the Silodam, projecting out into the Amsterdam harbor.
Robert Altman, the filmmaker died today. Ever since I began seriously pursuing photography I've been greatly influenced by movies--perhaps just as much as by still photography--and Altman is one of the American directors I've most admired. I can't remember what movie of his I saw first. It could have been M*A*S*Hor McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The latter featured the songs of Leonard Cohen, another artist who I greatly admire. It was Nashville, however, that really captivated me stylistically with characters moving in and out of frame, overlapping dialogue, and crisscrossing storylines. Later on, I was terribly enamored of Shortcuts, his adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories, a seemingly impossible task. Like Nashville it weaves together stories that are otherwise seemingly disconnected. Although my photography is not so much about people's narratives, Altman's landscape of random juxtapositons is the same one I wander across with my camera.
If all goes according to plan we will be leaving the Netherlands in a month and a half. Since 1993 I have been flying back and forth between Amsterdam and New York, all the while trying to maintain both a fine art and professional architectural photography career. It has not been easy.
Amsterdam (4x5 film)
In the beginning the Netherlands offered a fresh start, a new relationship, and a chance to broaden my horizons. As a transplanted New Yorker, however, I found my new home baffling, contradictory, and most definitely not the progressive land of tolerance so widely touted around the world. To explain this conclusion requires going through a litany of complaints, mostly trivial, but cumulatively overwhelming. I won't do that now.
It's getting late in November and the days are growing short, the sun is low in the sky when it does show itself in this mostly dreary climate. It's almost time for Sinterklaas to arrive on his steamboat from Spain accompanied by his Black Petes. The Dutch cling tenaciously to the iconography of Sinterklaas: the severe bearded man dressed in Catholic bishop's attire, the black-faced afro-wigged Petes cavorting about. It's a children's thing, but it is promoted with what seems an almost manic enthusiasm by adults. To outsiders interlopers like me who cannot get past the racist imagery of Black Pete, the whole business is repellent--and in bad taste. It is cultural heritage as kitsch--not a uniquely Dutch phenomenon, of course--but especially egregious.
I'm in Amsterdam, but my thoughts these days are across the Atlantic.
On January 25, 1981, 52 Americans who had been held hostage in Iran for 444 days returned to the United States. New York City Mayor Edward Koch invited them all to a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, offering them free hotel rooms and airfare for two. On January 30, approximately two million New Yorkers turned out to welcome them home. Twenty-three former hostages took part in the parade. They traveled in open cars up Broadway from Battery Park to City Hall, where Koch welcomed them and presented them with the keys to the city and the City Council’s Proud City Award. The Sanitation Department estimated that 971 tons of paper were thrown.
I read this morning in the New York Times that former East German spymaster Markus Wolf died yesterday, 17 years to the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Wolf epitomized the romantic image of the Cold War spy, especially as portrayed in John Le Carré's novels. While the Cold War was commonly seen as an epic battle between good and evil, Wolf occupied the shadowy realm of moral ambiguity. He and his counterparts in the West played a game, albeit a dangerous one, of spy vs. spy. Huge bureaucracies on both sides of the Iron Curtain jockeyed for advantage using shreds of information--the fact and fiction culled from wiretaps, satellite photographs, and undercover agents.
It is important today to remember that despite all the detail of information gathered and analyzed, the CIA and other intelligence agencies failed to foresee the end of the Cold War before it all unraveled in 1989 with the opening of the Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. The spies got it wrong then, just as they got it wrong recently in the runup to the war in Iraq. In the end, the intricacies of the game tend to obscure clear facts on the ground, and the prism of politics distorts and corrupts.
Lenin bust at the Soviet embassy, Berlin, 1990 (4x5 film) When I photographed the landscape of the Iron Curtain back in the '80s I sensed that the Cold War was reaching its denouement, though I had no idea that it would end so quickly. Over the course of a lifetime one has moments of prescience that are often not acted upon and go wasted. This was one time I seized the moment and stayed with it as history unfolded.
My photographs of the Iron Curtain can be found here. (website) A song I wrote about spies at the end of the Cold War can be listened to here. (mp3) And another about the fall of the Soviet Union is here. (mp3)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Pulling down statue of King George III, New York City, July 9, 1776
I posted this on the 4th of July earlier this year. Here it is again.
The following song is loosely based on the Declaration of Indpendence. Lines taken or adapted from the original text are highlighted. The recording was done straight to computer without any benefits of a recording studio. But the quality should be listenable to most ears. Please feel free to share the lyrics and sound file.
It's been gloomy here the past few days, and despite finally shaking my jetlag I remain listless and unmotivated. I walked my son to school this morning, and I passed the store window above. Mmm...
Nah. I just have to make it through to Wednesday when, hopefully, my home country will begin the long road back to sanity.
Flew back to Amsterdam after a productive two and half weeks in New York. The apartment here, the view--unfortunately the Netherlands has not offered much work or spiritual sustenance for me--and soon we may be moving to New York full time. Since I've been back the weather has been tempestuous with wind, rain, and hail. The skyscape of Holland. That's what I have from the balcony of our apartment.
