Williamsburg, Brooklyn

From the Williamsburg Bridge.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Typical Williamsburg scene.

Home Delivery outside of MoMA (digital)

The MoMA exhibition Home Delivery, Fabricating the Modern Dwelling continues outside on the asphalt vacant lot next door. This lot is the site of a proposed 75 floor tower designed by Jean Nouvel which the local community board rejected as out-of-scale with the neighborhood. The neighborhood being Midtown Manhattan, the greatest concentration of super tall buildings on the planet.

Home Delivery outside of MoMA (digital)

The collection of buildings plopped down temporarily next to MoMA is decidedly under scale for the neighborhood, ranging from a 76 square foot living cube to a mini skyscraper that required some exertion to reach the upper terrace. (Nothing for me with my sixth floor walk-up office in lower Manhattan.) The view of these odd little structures in the midst of New York’s skyscrapers is, well, endearing. But I can’t imagine the community board going for these either.

The Dali exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (digital)

Continuing my visit to MoMA. I find it increasingly difficult to deal with the crowds of people in the museum, and though the building’s design has been generally hailed, I find it less comfortable than any of the museum’s previous incarnations. The circulation area where the escalators lead up and down is particularly crowded and even gloomy. I yearn for a more open transparent series of vertical movements, perhaps two or three, to somewhat disperse the crush of cultural consumers.

Vector Wall by Reiser and Umemoto at MoMA (digital)

At the top floor where I was going the crowd was thick as flies due to the popular Salvadore Dali exhibition, but the modular housing exhibition Home Delivery was heavily trafficked as well. I took a couple of pictures in the entry areas of both shows–Dali’s visage hovering above the flood of people–the diaphanous Vector Wall by Reiser and Umemoto glowing and undulating.

Unfortunately, photographs were not allowed inside the Home Delivery exhibition, and so–the freedom to express myself as a photographer curtailed (for whatever good reason the museum may have)–I will refrain from talking about the contents inside. But on to the modular houses outside…

Photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher at MoMA (digital)

I went to the Museum of Modern Art yesterday to see Home Delivery, the exhibit on pre-fabricated housing, but along the way, cruised through the photography galleries. I was dismayed to see yet another major Bernd and Hilla Becher exhibition, at least at first. Don’t misunderstand, I have always greatly admired their work and appreciated the dogged passion underneath their coolly conceptual approach to architecture and landscape. Sadly, Bernd Becher died last year.

But no artists I can think of have been more overexposed in the past decade or so than the Bechers. Not only is their work featured in virtually every survey of recent photography, we are reminded constantly of all the photographers who have been influenced by them as teachers, notably the Germans Gursky, Ruff, and Struth. All worthy artists, I am particularly fond of Thomas Struth’s pictures. I just think it’s time for curators to move on.

As I walked through the Becher exhibit, however, I found myself recalling why I like their work–despite its ubiquity–and was very happy to see two walls of images less rigorously centered on a particular building type where the landscape surrounding their objects of single-minded observation is allowed a greater role. There were two series, one which dealt with steel mills with the blast furnaces and attendant structures arrayed against the horizon.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Walker Evans (1935)

One scene in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania looked familiar–and then it flashed in my head. The same cemetery, row of houses, and distant factory were photographed in the 1930s by Walker Evans. The Bechers were undoubtedly aware of the quotation, and I was pleased to see them acknowledge this connection to photographic history and to one of the icons of landscape/documentary photography.

But enough about the Bechers.

Wave Hill greenhouse

Just a summer interlude. A visit to Wave Hill, an estate turned into public garden and cultural center. A showery day, we ducked in to the greenhouse to avoid some raindrops.

Wave Hill greenhouse

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.

(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 4×5 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 4×5 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.

Houston and Bowery (4×5 film)

A 4×5 variation of an earlier digital shot. This one with Hummer.

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.

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.

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.

New York Marble Cemetery (digital)

One of the oldest cemeteries in the city lies hidden within the block bounded by the Bowery, East 3rd, East 2nd, and Second Avenue. We walked by last Sunday, and the gate was open, so we went in. There are no traditional graves or headstones. Under the grass are vaults, and the names of the deceased are on stone tablets set in the walls of the cemetery. In many places the walls are crumbling, and despite the landmark status of the site, it remains a vulnerable piece of Lower East Side history.

Historical Studies/Social Science Library • Wallace Harrison (digital)

While photographing a new building at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, I walked around the campus at lunch time, and took snapshots of two architectural gems, one by Robert Geddes (see earlier post and the other by Wallace K. Harrison.

Historical Studies/Social Science Library (digital)

Historical Studies/Social Science Library (digital)

The two groupings of buildings are directly adjacent to each other–the Harrison designed Historical Studies/Social Science Library was completed in 1964, and the Geddes complex a few years later. But stylistically, they are further apart. Both the brutalism of Geddes and the lighter/whiter neo-classicim of Harrison (and other architects like Phillip Johnson and Edward Durell Stone) were reactions to the dominate Miesian school of architecture.

Historical Studies/Social Science Library (digital)

One rarely finds the two styles side by side as they would seem to be incompatible. Here in Princeton, however, there is an architectural dialog between the two schools of thought, brought together in part by the integration of landscape and architecture.

See the post below for the Geddes buildings.

Institute for Advanced Study • Princeton, New Jersey (digital)

I’ve been down to Princeton a number of times to photograph a new building extension at the Institute for Advanced Study, a research center near Princeton University. It is, perhaps, best known for its former illustrious faculty member, Albert Einstein.

Dining Hall • designed by Robert Geddes (digital)

I haven’t presented my pictures to the client yet, so I’ll hold off showing them for now. But while there I walked around the IAS campus and discovered remarkable buildings by architects Robert Geddes and Wallace K. Harrison. Harrison, part of the firm Harrison, Abramovitz & Harris, which designed the Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center and a number of bland international style skyscrapers in Manhattan in the ’60s, here created something sublime. Pictures to come.

West Building • Robert Geddes (digital)

Geddes designed a dining hall and adjacent academic building with birch garden in between in a style that is commonly referred to (unfortunately) as brutalism. The term has more to do with the use of rough concrete than of anything pejoratively brutal, but the public has readily attached the “brutal” misnomer to these often unloved buildings. The Geddes complex of buildings, however, is a relatively unknown masterpiece melding hard structure with soft landscape.

Dining Hall • Robert Geddes (digital)

West Building • Robert Geddes (digital)

These pictures, and those that follow, were made on the fly while breaking for lunch, not necessarily in the best light, and no interiors–the dining hall interior is spectacular. While continuing to use the 4×5 view camera for most of my assignment work and personal projects, I am now using the wonderful new Sigma DP1 as my go anywhere pocket camera.

Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn (digital)

Another drive-by photo from the car window.

Ground Zero

Driving back from a shoot in Brooklyn I popped out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and drove up the West Side Highway along the construction cranes in the pit of Ground Zero. The car I had rented had a sunroof, and I looked up and grabbed this shot through the glass.

The New York Public Library (digital)

My visit to the New York Public Library to see Eminent Domain, a photography exhibition about New York City, started off well enough. Walking in to the building I noted that “flash photography” was not allowed, but was happy that I would be able to take pictures inside. I walked through the entrance to the exhibit and began reading the introductory text:

As the proposed regulations on photographing in New York City illustrate, photography is often subject to such private/public complications. Indeed, issues of privacy and image rights have troubled photography throughout its history; with the shift to digital media and the increasing regulation of public space (both literal and virtual), these issues are becoming even more complex. A photograph, after all, is a transaction between the private and the public that is negotiated through the taking of an image—a kind of eminent domain of the visual realm.

Stephen C. Pinson (curator)

Having read the text, I wandered about the dimly lit gallery waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. It’s a beautiful room, and the exhibit itself was nicely designed, but the darkness was problematic. The photographs deserve a brighter, cleaner, more neutral environment.

Eminent Domain • Ethan Levitas photos (digital)

As I leaned my camera against a column to do the image above, a guard ambushed me, barking loudly, “No photography allowed! I told you when you came in. Put away the camera.” My 9-year-old son was a bit shocked to see his father reprimanded with such harshness. I had unwittingly committed the crime of taking a picture of an exhibition relating to the increasing “regulation of public space (both literal and virtual).” Oops.

Still a little shaken by the reprimand, I looked around the exhibit. Nothing in the show itself had quite the impact of the guard’s presumption of authority over the act of photography. The concept of eminent domain and the myriad implications of the phrase should have resulted in an exhibit of challenging work that addressed the blurring of public and private realm, not to mention the way in which government employs eminent domain for purposes that seem to make public good and private profit interchangeable.

Thomas Holton

Jacob Riis famously photographed the living conditions of immigrants in their tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His pictures were intended to shock the pampered consciences of the respectable class of Manhattanites. Riis’s high moral dudgeon achieved results in the social sphere, but one perceives little empathy in his pictures. His flash powder explosions of light remain powerful and pitiless depictions of poverty. In comparison, Thomas Holton’s well-intentioned pictures of family life in Chinatown seem too respectful, too careful of the relationship built up between photographer and subjects. I found myself wanting something more intrusive, personally riskier. I like the photo above the best because, for once, the interaction between participants is openly acknowledged.

Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard’s square format images of Lower East Side garment businesses and the like were attractively nostalgic, but too casual, off-hand. It’s hard to believe the accompanying text refers to these images:

Although centered on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, the completed project (an archive of about 500 images) captures the wide-ranging forces of globalization, with specific attention to the route and final destination of New York’s castoff clothing in the contemporary rag trade. As such, Analogue is not only a meditation on the costs of urban redevelopment, but an exploration of the replacement of local markets by a global economy. As its name suggests, Analogue is also an elegy of sorts to a long-standing tradition of documentary photography, from Atget to Walker Evans, which Leonard sees passing with the onset of digital photography.

Betinna Johae

Bettina Johae’s ambitious project in which she traveled the periphery of the city’s five boroughs floats in limbo between a conceptual piece and a collection of individual images. Some of the photographs are mounted on the wall on movable pages that can be leafed through, and others are shown on small video monitors. The mounted photos are not well lit, and the considerably brighter back-lit images are pixellated even at small size. The website is the best way to see her work.

Ethan Levitas

Ethan Levitas’s subway cars are the strongest images in the show, each train car (or parts of two cars) photographed at the same distance capturing people framed in the windows. We see faces, backs of heads, gestures, flecks of color and pattern–people in public, but suspended in moments of private isolation.

Reiner Leist

Reiner Leist has photographed the scene outside his studio window almost every day for over 10 years using an 8×10 view camera. The images are murky and hold little detail despite the 8×10 format. Different household objects are seen in the foreground on different days. During the making of the series, the Twin Towers disappear. The book costs $85.

New York has undergone historic transformation in recent years, first rising from financial collapse and the rubble of the ’70s and ’80s, and then, at a quickening pace, rising from the ashes of September 11. There have been profound dislocations of neighborhoods, while the population has continued to increase, diversify, and stratify. New York careers forward in the midst of a new gilded age, an era of mega real estate projects designed by rock star architects held aloft on the ether of money while war grinds on far away in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Whatever the merits of the various photographers’ work, too little of this complex dynamism can be found in the exhibition at the Public Library.

Red Hook, Brooklyn

Without comment.