Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni both died today, two of the great filmmakers of the modern era. While Bergman, perhaps, looms larger in the public consciousness, it was Antonioni who was most inspiring to me as a photographer. There was Blowup, of course, about a photographer (David Hemmings) who shoots fashion, but also pursues his own photographic muse in the London street. The photographer blows up a series of pictures in which he thinks he sees a murder committed. The bigger the prints get the more the grain breaks apart, and reality gives way. Blowup was very much of the '60s, and I saw it--probably--about 1972.
Although I was greatly attracted to the counter cultural aspects of Blowup and Zabriskie Point, I was most influenced by Antonioni's visual approach to the landscape, the way the frame held its gaze then moved as figures perambulated in and out and through. Films like L'Avventura, The Red Desert, and The Passenger best exemplified this primacy of the camera frame. I still remember sitting in the theater and being stunned by the long final shot in The Passenger, one of the most astonishing achievements in film history.
The city of New York has proposed requiring permits for photography and film making in the street.
The Mayor’s Office of Theater, Film, and Broadcasting, which coordinates film and television production and issues permits around the five boroughs, is considering rules that could potentially severely restrict the ability of even amateur photographers and filmmakers to operate in New York City. The NY Times reports that the city’s tentative rules include requiring any group of two or more people who want to use a camera in a single public location for more than a half hour (including setup and breakdown time) to get a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance. The regulation would also apply to any group of five or more people who would be using a tripod for more than ten minutes, including setup and breakdown time.
-(Excerpted from the Gothamist)
Film by Jem Cohen
Jem Cohen, an independent filmmaker, whom I've met, writes the following:
Unfortunately, we believe we must see the proposed regulations not only as a blow against New York as a city that welcomes and inspires art-making (and historical documentation), but as part of a continuum of broader attacks against civil liberties and free expression.
I couldn't agree more. An organization called Picture New York - without pictures of New Yorkis leading the opposition against the city's proposal. If you want to know more, or would like to help, please sign the petition on the site.
As a photographer who has, to a great extent, built a career on photographing the streets and parks of New York, I feel it is my responsibility to speak out on this issue. Those of us who express ourselves using a camera are the eyes of the city. Whether we operate as commercial artists, fine artists, documentarists, bloggers, or journalists, we present the image of the city to the world. Our efforts should be encouraged, not suppressed.
Father Duffy Square (Times Square), Lee Friedlander Imagine New York without Walker Evans, Berenice Abbot, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Ezra Stoller, Diane Arbus, Joel Meyerowitz, Cindy Sherman, Len Jenshel, Jan Staller, Joel Sternfeld, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, and on and on. These are artists who have freely wielded their still cameras in this city. A similar list of filmmakers could as easily be compiled.
Billy's Antiques is a piece of craziness that holds on despite the gentrification around it. I'm sure that part of its longevity is the fact that this junk/curio/antique tent occupies a slender margin of land along Houston Street, not really wide enough for a building. Across the Bowery at Houston Street, Daniel Boulud is planning his latest culinary venture in the Big Apple. This one, to be called DBGB (Daniel Boulud Good Burger), is a few doors from the former punk club CBGB (Country BlueGrass Blues). Get it?
Third Avenue/Cooper Square and East 7th Street (4x5 film)
I finally finished photographing 39 buildings all around town for a real estate client. Whew.
After completing the last shot I walked down Third Avenue to Cooper Square where new construction is transforming the landscape. In the foreground, a construction fence surrounds the site of Cooper Union's new academic building, and in the rear a mega tower looms over the neighborhood. It's a hotel designed by Studio Carlos Zapata, which did the modern addition to Chicago's Soldier Field. Whatever the appropriateness of the tower, it promises to be an expressive presence. There's some pretty risky looking cantilevering going on in the reinforced concrete skeleton. I assume they know what they're doing.
I set my 4x5 camera up on Third Avenue looking south with eastern sunlight raking across the scene. I did several shots with different arrangements of people and vehicles. I knew what I wanted from having walked by this corner a couple of times in the past few weeks.
I often walk across town on Prince Street through Nolita (northern Little Italy) and Soho. It's a familiar environment, one that I generally take for granted. But when I slow down a bit, and look into the flow of people, the blur of signage, the play of light and shadow, I find a world in which the self-conscious display of advertising and architecture echoes the real flesh and blood humanity moving through it. Men and women clutch at each other. Spoken words are not so much communication as non sequiturs, repeated slogans. Objects of desire–faces, bodies, clothing, electronics–float reflected, spotlit, behind glass.
The new New Museum is beginning to take shape. It's on the Bowery just around the corner from my apartment on Stanton Street, and I pass it nearly every day. The architects are Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. They do terrific stuff. Like it or not (think metal boxes with few windows), this will be one of the most noteworthy buildings constructed in new York in the last few decades. I'll be back with more pictures as things progress.
We took a harbor tour yesterday with friends from the Netherlands. The tour was fascinating–a look at the working harbor–but we ended up afterwards in a tourist restaurant at the South Street Seaport, a greasy meal accompanied by a moaning crooner on guitar. When he did Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond, stopping to let the crowd fill in the duh duh duhs, well, good times never seemed so bad, and I was rapidly reaching the end of my tether.
Christopher Street My friend Suzanne Vega has just come out with Beauty and Crime, her first album in a number of years, and the first since being cut by her previous record company. When someone like Suzanne gets tossed, you need no more proof of how deeply lost the record business is. Fortunately, for her, and for us, there are still smaller companies like Blue Note who know what they are doing.
New York City has always been a presence in Suzanne's work, but with Beauty and Crime it becomes more than backdrop, it's even personified. New York is a Woman is as beautiful as anything she has written. Another of those amazing tight rope walks that few artists are capable of. Other songs touch the scars of 9/11. One vividly evokes her brother Tim living on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, unable to overcome his demons and alcohol.
Ludlow Street I heard many of the songs last fall as she and I drove across the Czech Republic. Rough takes only. Some of the songs have changed little, others more substantially. The last song, Obvious Question, is new to me. Like so much of Suzanne's writing over the years, there's a lightness where one might get portentous or maudlin. Where another writer might struggle for meaning, Suzanne successfully employs a deft turn of phrase–musically or lyrically–and lets it go at that.I'll have more to say about this album later once I've had a chance to listen some more. Here is the New York Times review.
Since settling back in New York after ping-ponging between NYC and Amsterdam for 15 years, I've made contact with several friends who I lost track during that time. One of them, Tim Raymond, came down from Upstate New York for a visit. Tim's a painter who I met back in Baltimore in the mid-seventies when I was in art school. Tim, like me, eventually made his way to New York, and cobbled together a living, like the rest of us, while painting these intense, sometimes serene, sometimes brooding, landscapes. I'll have to photograph the ones I have and put them up here.
Mars Bar by Tim Raymond
After an evening of reminiscing Tim hit two bars on the way back to where he was staying. One of them, the Mars Bar, is a graffiti festooned wreck at East 1st Street and Second Avenue. It was once the single watering hole amidst abandoned buildings and vacant lots on this part of lower Second Avenue. It's now surrounded by expensive apartments and an immense Whole Foods supermarket on Houston Streets.
Fake Graffiti in the Whole Foods supermarket
Earlier in the day I walked along the same stretch of Second Avenue with my friend Art Presson. He pointed out a chain bursting through the bared chest of a "bodog fighter" on a poster. I snapped.
Second Avenue between Houston Street and East 1st Street
Roosevelt Park near Delancey Street
Walking further south along Roosevelt Park we came across a group of elderly Chinese men who collect songbirds. They hang the cages along clotheslines, talk, and sip coffee. Coincidentally, an article appeared about the songbird men in today's New York Times. (registration required for the Times online)
As is understood by anyone who photographs this city, it is a landscape of anecdotal, small moments, and iconic majesty–both. This is an image from my archive made with a 4x5 view camera in the early to mid-eighties. I was on a setback of an apartment building in Tudor City looking for a good view of the UN Plaza Hotel to the north. This was the view looking west along 42nd Street toward the Chrysler Building.
I like the crude attempt at making a peace symbol out of the "R" in Tudor City. "DOR" somehow says "WAR" to me. Maybe it's the war that's getting to me.
Dean Street, Brooklyn John Szarkowski, photographer and former photo curator of the Museum of Modern Art died a few days ago. Much has been written about his significance in bringing photography fully into its own as a medium deserving the same attention as painting and sculpture. He's the guy who moved the Modern from Family of Man sentimentality to the sharp-eyed ascerbity of Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston. Here is the beautifully written obituary by Philip Gefter in the New York Times. I love his take down of Hilton Kramer, the art critic hack who used to write for the Times:
“Mr. Szarkowski throws all caution to the winds and speaks of Mr. Eggleston’s pictures as ‘perfect,’ ” Hilton Kramer wrote in The Times. “Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.” Mr. Eggleston would come to be considered a pioneer of color photography.
Szarkowski was important to me in various ways, but perhaps most importantly for his championing of color photography. When I was a struggling art student down in Baltimore fending off retrograde professors, I began experimenting with shooting color slides. When I saw Eggleston's Guide, the book based on the exhibition at MoMA, it hit me like a ton of bricks, and confirmed the path I had started down. That was 1976. The next year I went to Cooper Union in New York, and began studying with Joel Meyerowitz, whose color street photography I found inspiring.
Once in New York I saw Szarkowski's fascinating–and controversial–show Mirrors and Windows. A few years later, after completing the first phase of my Iron Curtain project, Szarkowski bought several of my prints for the museum. I met him, briefly. Shook his hand. He said some nice things to me about my work. I never met him again, but have always felt honored to have had my work recognized by this great and influential man.
Monitor and Merrimac monument by Antonio de Filippo (1900–1993)
A few days ago I returned to McGolrick Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to photograph the Monitor and Merrimac monument. I am photographing Civil War related monuments around Brooklyn for an exhibit this fall. McGolrick is a peaceful neighborhood park surrounded by mostly modest houses, many with aluminum or vinyl siding in the prevailing Greenpoint fashion.
Unlike the other Civil War monuments I've photographed, which were made shortly after the war, this one was not commissioned until the 1930s. According to what I've read, it was intended to commemorate the work of John Ericsson, the Swedish/American inventor who created the Monitor, the iron clad warship.
From the New York City Parks Department website:
The Monitor was the product of Ericsson’s response to the Confederacy’s intent in early 1861 to ironclad its warship, the Merrimac. Ericsson built the Monitor at Greenpoint’s Continental Iron Works, owned by local resident Thomas Fitch Rowland. The ship’s engine and machinery were fabricated in Greenwich Village at the Delamater Iron Works, with whom Ericsson was in partnership. The keel was laid on October 15, 1861, and within an astounding 100 days, the Monitor was launched from Greenpoint on January 30, 1862. Ericsson’s newfangled ship was put to the test in a famous battle against the Merrimac at Hampton Roads, Virginia on March 9, 1862, in which the Union forces averted defeat.
The sculpture itself is oddly proportioned. A muscled male nude with oversized hands and feet tugs at a rope tied around a capstan. He sits in a tiny boat, I assume meant to represent the Monitor, which is surrounded by stylized waves. The sculpture is clearly a product of the '30s, and relates to other classically inspired figures around the city. The earlier Civil War sculptures are much more naturalistic and attempt to express ideals attributed to the various generals and political leaders of the time. This monument, far removed in time from its subject, is heroic but less personal.
McGolrick Park
Across the park from the Monitor and Merrimac monument the heroic and prosaic coexist.
Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
The weather has been spectacular lately, and I have been out shooting as much as possible. I am still photographing a long list of buildings for a client–almost done now–and wish there was more time for other photography. On Sunday morning I zipped over to East 16th and Third Avenue to grab one of the buildings in the best light. Then, as I was heading for the subway, I found myself standing at East 14th and Third Avenue, the northwestern corner of the Lower East Side project area. I pulled out my digital camera and snapped a few shots, liked what I saw, and set up my view camera. The picture above is similar to the 4x5 film frame. The new building at center is one of the many residential towers going up along Third Avenue and the Bowery. The light was sharp, the air crisp.
View looking north from the West Village
New York, just like I pictured it. Skyscrapers and everything!
On Monday, after a day working with my assistant Chris, we went up on the roof of my apartment building to catch the skyline against a cloud studded backdrop.
It is hard to quantify the impact of September 11th now almost 6 years ago. As I walk by the vast pit of the excavated WTC site ringed by skyscrapers old and new, I cannot think but how poisoned the well of our democracy has become–the result of that unprecedented act of barbarism–how completely we have since handed victory to the gang of religious fanatics who perpetrated the act. The war in Iraq: the lies that justified invasion, the ongoing death and destruction, the damage done to the Constitution, to the separation of powers, to the basic tenants of law and human rights.
Today's pardon of Lewis Libby by the President is but the latest travesty in a long line of abuses, but perhaps the lowest point to be found in a post-9/11 landscape strip mined of once hallowed moral high ground.
As I watch the tourists scurry around Ground Zero straining for a view into the pit, I understand the curiosity, the voyeurism. I am, after all, a photographer. But I also sense that many are seeking something else more troubling–a whiff of acrid smoke, a frisson of fear. That fear has governed our political lives for six years.
