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.