New York/Ground Zero


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.

New York/Eminent Domain


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.

New York/Red Hook


Red Hook, New York

I’m shooting some apartments for an architect in Red Hook, the waterfront neighborhood just below Carroll Gardens. It’s a pretty gritty environment, but fascinating–docks, factories, lofts, little houses, big housing projects, and coming soon. Ikea. It would be gentrified already, but it’s notoriously hard to get to. No subway.

New York/Reconnaissance


Red Hook, New York

There’s an article in the Guardian from a few days ago linking the increasing harassment of photographers to the general fear of terrorism. I think there’s some truth to that. The author also relates it to movie plots in which terrorists seem always to be casing the joint with a camera.

I think the latter point is a bit overstated, but I do believe that there is an increased climate of distrust in the air–certainly post-911–but I believe it started before that. Photographers have become psychological scapegoats, the victims of heightened vigilance, even paranoia. Ironically, this climate has emerged at the same that photography has been greatly democratized by digital cameras, websites, flickr, and other online means of disseminating images. The world is awash in pictures; yet we fear the power of photographs more than ever.


Red Hook, Brooklyn

As one who has experienced first hand what it’s like to try taking pictures in a communist country, I greatly sympathize with the quote below posted on the blog the Online Photographer.

I remember reading an article about East Germany in _National Geographic_ back in the early ’70s, in which the author describes being harassed by the Volkspolizei for having taken a photograph of something he “shouldn’t” have–a bridge or some other public edifice, as I recall. I remember thinking “Boy, I’m sure glad that sort of thing can’t happen in the USA!”

Just a few years ago, some colleagues of mine from Germany were taking in the sights along the Mall in Washington DC, taking pictures of the grand public edifices. Apparently they took a photograph of something they “shouldn’t” have, as they were stopped and questioned twice by police, and were obliged to delete several shots from their digital cameras.

It was a nice country, while it lasted. Perhaps it isn’t too late to take it back.

New York/Prohibited Sight


Robber Barons by Studio Job–corporate greed in bronze (digital)

One of the primary purposes of this journal is to chart my course through the city–and elsewhere–and comment, where appropriate, on the things I see, neighborhoods I walk through, architecture I encounter, exhibits I visit. Sometimes I go out with my 4×5 view camera, and take snapshots with my digital camera on the side–a sort of comment on my own activity. Other times I just shoot off the cuff with the digital camera, going back, to some extent, to the 35mm street photography style of my student days.

The world I perambulate is becoming less and less a free space for visual commentary–meaning photography is forbidden. It’s an insidious incremental crimping of the public domain, and there are now all sorts of places that are ambiguous public/private zones where various kinds of behavior and speech can be regulated.


Taxidermy by Melissa Dixson, wall paper by the Timorous Beasties (digital)

The pictures above was taken in Moss, an extraordinary design store in Soho that is as much gallery as shop. In fact, the current work on display featuring Dutch artist-designers was funded by the government of the Netherlands. Much of the work shown is political in nature, and like most political art, it is consigned to a gallery world populated primarily by supposedly high-minded wealthy individuals. The display above juxtaposes a grouping of idealized stuffed foxes cavorting against a wallpaper background created by the Timorous Beasties depicting “victory” in the Iraq war with bloody drips and splotches. To the victor the spoils.

After casually taking the preceding photos, I was informed by the shop staff that photography was not allowed. This being a private business, I quickly acceded to their demand, but I did ask the sales person, why? As is so often the case, she didn’t actually know. There may, in fact, be a good reason–at least from the shop’s point of view–but from my position as a blogger, a photographer, a (granted) self-appointed visual critic, my intentions have been stifled.

Now, on to the “public” library…

New York/Tribeca


A telephone building in Tribeca (digital)

Scattered around Manhattan, particularly lower Manhattan, there are a number of telephone skyscrapers, buildings that were built principally to hold switching equipment and the like. One especially unlovely blank walled monolith near the Brooklyn Bridge is likely to be transformed into a glass windowed office tower.


Western Union building in Tribeca designed by Ralph Walker (digital)


Barclay-Vesey building designed by Ralph Walker (digital)

Walking downtown through Tribeca the other day I encountered several phone buildings designed by Ralph Walker, the great Art Deco architect, which prove that such structures need not be bad architectural neighbors. The Barclay-Vesey building, regarded as the first Art Deco skyscraper, was badly damaged on 9/11 and has been fully restored.

New York/WTC


Ground Zero/WTC (digital)

Made another walk with my view camera down to Ground Zero/WTC. Construction continues mostly below ground focused especially on the transportation infrastructure. WTC 7 is the only finished building that replaces anything lost on 9/11, but eventually new towers will rise from what is still a giant hole in the ground.


Pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway (digital)

There is still no good place for tourists and visitors to advantageously view the entire WTC site. As a result, people wander about picking their way through a maze of fences and barriers. The ill-fated Deutsche Bank building remains shrouded in netting, but is slowly coming down.

Note: Thanks to Blogger being down again for uploading to ftp blog sites, I accidentally overwrote my last post. I’ll try to re-up those photos later. Blogger’s poor performance has greatly tarnished my previously high esteem for Google, the company that offers the service.

New York/Clinton


Somewhere in Soho just off Broadway (4×5 film)

Like many kids in the early 60s, I was a fan of John F. Kennedy. I kept a plaque in my bedroom with Kennedy’s famous “ask not” quote embossed on it. He was the first president I knew, and his natural eloquence and character formed my understanding of who and what an American president was supposed to be. I was 9 years old when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas.

I was 14 years old in 1968, the most tumultuous year, perhaps, in post war American history. I was young, but fully aware of what was going on–the civil rights struggle and the war in Vietnam. The murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy left me devastated and heartbroken, and I don’t think I’ve ever really recovered. I remember poignantly Teddy Kennedy’s eulogy delivered in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as deeply eloquent a tribute as has ever been written.

A few days ago Teddy Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and while one hopes for his recovery, I am already prepared for the worst.

We are in the middle of a dramatic and prolonged Democratic presidential campaign between the heir to Bill Clinton’s two term presidency and, to many of us, the heir to the legacy of the Kennedy brothers. We all know the personal dangers associated with Barack Obama’s candidacy as the first black man with a real chance to the highest office in the land. And we all know–and see–how messages of hope and idealism pose a threat to the status quo. There is an undercurrent of anger that lurks menacingly.

Yesterday Hillary Clinton raised the specter of assassination in an off hand reference to Bobby Kennedy, and how his campaign ran into June of 1968. When I read her comments and watched her deliver them on YouTube, I froze inside. She had invoked one of the darkest moments in American political history to justify the continuation of her campaign, knowing–surely–that in doing so, she was dipping, however gingerly, into a poisonous well of hatred.

Hillary Clinton’s honor (and campaign) now hangs in tatters along with the legacy of Bill Clinton’s presidency. It’s over. Good riddance.

New York/Canal Street


Canal Street at Sixth Avenue and Thompson

Had a visitor yesterday from the Bay Area, architect friend David Kesler. I gave him a speed tour of a large chunk of lower Manhattan: the Bowery, the East Village, Lower East Side, across Soho to the area around Canal Street where it borders Tribeca.


David Kesler in front of the Storefront for Art and Architecture

New York/Dumbo


Under the Manhattan Bridge (digital)

First of all, a large international festival in New York dedicated to contemporary photography is a great idea. Second of all, locating it in Dumbo, the atmospheric neighborhood of warehouse and factory buildings beneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges is brilliant.

A few years ago, powerHouse Books, the photo book publisher moved to Dumbo from cramped quarters in Manhattan and created a spacious book store/gallery called the powerHouse Arena. Likewise, VII Photo Agency, representing photojournalists James Nachtwey and Lauren Greenfield, among others, located its NYC offices with accompanying book store and gallery in Dumbo. Combine these companies with the visionary real estate firm Two Trees, and the necessary synergy was in place to make an event like this possible.


Tobacco Warehouse (digital)

The festival was not, thankfully, another showcase of commercial galleries. Nor was it a “Whitney Biennial, ” which has become so tiresome as a vehicle for curatorial excess that I go out of my way to avoid it. Four curators–you can’t live without ’em–each put together thematic shows aimed at suggesting where contemporary photography is heading.

Well, actually, I didn’t go for Tim Barber’s more-the-merrier show of dozens of images all the same size, all the same weight, mix and match, stream of consciousness, grab bag of goodies, random musings, serendipitous connections, or as Barber puts it, an exquisite corpse. Give me more less is more, please.


Natalie Czech photo (digital)

I liked Lesley Martin’s “Ubiquitous Image” even though, theoretically, I’m supposed to be a straight photography kind of person. Maybe it was the exhibition space, which was better lit and better organized than the others, or maybe it was the work itself. It was all art about photography, or making use of photography, or found photography, rather than photography, but I found much of it interesting, occasionally beautiful, and generally coherent. Natalie Czech’s big Photoshop collages were particularly nice. Similarly, I liked the shredded strips of images by Joachim Schmid, non photographs comprised entirely of photographic images.


Michel Campeau photos (digital)

Martin’s Parr’s “New Typologies” should have interested me more, but I guess I’m a little burned out on the idea of typologies. Although there is a long photographic tradition behind this kind of work–think Blossveldt, Saunders, the Bechers, et al–I found myself wanting Parr’s selected photographers to be less bloody systematic and more spontaneous. That said, I really liked Michel Campeau’s beautiful/ugly images of stuff in traditional photographic darkrooms. Did we really work in places like this once? I wanted to like Jan Kempenaer’s documentations of Soviet era monuments, but couldn’t get past the Becher-induced trance. I like the Bechers, by the way. And if that’s the way he wants to work, I wanted view camera detail rather than the slightly soft graininess of medium format. I enjoyed Sarah Pickering’s pictures of explosions. Boom.


Simon Norfolk photos (digital)

Finally, Kathy Ryan’s exhibit was harder for me to grasp thematically, and it was the most difficult space–St. Ann’s Warehouse–to look at work. There were lectures and panel discussions going on in the theater located at the center of the space. I liked the two programs I went to, but the bustle of people coming and going didn’t help the exhibition. Andreas Gefeller’s large, probably beautiful prints were hurt the most because they were basically unlit. Although I am not opposed to Ryan’s notion that many photographers take their cues from the other visual arts, I don’t know if I really want to think this way when comparing Simon Norfolk’s images of rocket installations and Horacio Salinas’s images of discarded tires. Or Katherin Wolkoff’s deer nests and Stephen Gill’s crumpled paper. I couldn’t follow, or didn’t want to follow, the curator’s thread through such disparate work. By the way, of all the work in the festival, I am probably most naturally attracted to Simon Norfolk’s images of war torn landscapes. I’ll look for a chance to write about him in the future.


Pizza restaurant in Dumbo (digital)

The over all theme of the festival was the future of photography. Given the extreme diversity of contemporary photography–from straight to staged, composed to found, reused to deauthorized–the future, as seen in this festival, remains uncertain, leading off in different directions. But certainly, photography is not, as some have asserted, a medium in decline.

New York/Limbo

Blogger is currently on the fritz for those of us on our own ftp servers. I have not been able to upload images for the past 24 hours or so.

So, please stand by.

UPDATE: After twiddling my thumbs in frustration that none of my photos were loading, I resorted to cutting and pasting code into the Blogger window, which did the trick. But lots of extra work.

UPDATE: It has now been several days that Blogger has been broken for those who do ftp publishing. That means that thousands of people are unable to upload images onto their blogs without the workaround mentioned above, which is less than easy. Google/Blogger has not responded to the deluge of complaints on their help website. This is a major black eye for a company that states in its corporate policy: “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”

UPDATE: Blogger working again after long wait.

New York/Dumbo


Dumbo, Brooklyn (digital – Sigma DP1)

I spent a few hours each day, Saturday and Sunday, at the New York Photo Festival. I’ll have a number of things to say about the festival later, but first I’d like to comment on a new camera I’m trying out. It’s the Sigma DP1, a point and shoot camera with a full size Foveon sensor–the first camera this small to have such a large sensor.

I’m a little unsure how to characterize the pictures this camera produces. They are unlike any I’ve encountered before. Extremely rich, wide tonal range, and very sharp. But different in ways I can’t yet put my finger on. The picture above was taken in Dumbo, Brooklyn on my way to the festival under a dead gray sky, a situation my Ricoh GR digital is hard pressed to handle. The skies would tend to wash out, or the foreground would lose color clarity, or clear definition between colors. Here, the sky holds weight, colors are true, and neutrals remain neutral.

The DP1 only produces images 2640 x 1760 pixels, which is small compared to the many digital cameras that pack a lot of pixels onto miniature chips. But these are RAW images, and certainly enough size for 8×10 prints, and possibly larger if the resolution is carefully interpolated up. Moreover, the Foveon sensor is a whole other animal, but you can look up what more tech oriented people have to say about it.

What we have here is a rather rarefied camera for serious photographers who want a pocket camera that will produce DSLR quality–or near DSLR–and who want a wide lens, don’t care about zooms, and are more interested in image quality than megapixels. Could be the perfect blog, carry everywhere, camera for me.

New York/LES


Orchard Street (digital)

After shooting a building for a client in Midtown in the morning, I spent several hours with the view camera on the Lower East Side. I returned to a spot on Orchard Street that I had looked at previously without my camera, and set up a view with tenements and a new rather alien tower in the background. I realized later, that the tenement in the foreground, stripped of its stoop, is the location of a photograph I did in 1980.


Orchard Street, 1980 (4×5 film)

Orchard Street, while still full of shops, and generally much fixed up over 1980, is less vibrant than it once was. Back then, it was an intense island of commerce in the midst of an often scary neighborhood. Although, the street is still closed off to cars on Sundays, the street hawkers and those protecting the goods displayed on the sidewalk can be intimidating rather than inviting. At the same time, clubs, bars, and more fashionable shops are gradually pushing out the discount trade.


Ludlow Street (digital)

Nearby on Ludlow, opposite one of the most characteristic blocks of tenements on the Lower East Side, a new building rises on the base of an older structure. In this area, near the Tenement Museum, the city has placed historic bishop’s crook light fixtures.


Rivington Street (digital)

On Rivington, I photographed a synagogue that has been converted to housing. This has happened all over the neighborhood. Though some have remained synagogues, others have been reconsecrated as churches.


M’Finda Kalunga Garden between Rivington and Delancey (digital)

I ended my walk at the M’Finda Kalunga Garden in Sarah D. Roosevelt Park between Rivington And Delancey Streets. I saw that my former building neighbor Bob Humber was inside the garden–he’s a regular volunteer there–and he let me inside the gate. This garden was established in 1983, which makes it one of the oldest community gardens on the Lower East Side.

On the fence of the garden is an information sign stating that the adjacent playground was formerly the location of New York’s African burial ground.

Dutch colonists brought the first Africans to the New Amsterdam colony in the late 1500s. By 1748, African-Americans, slave and free, made up 20% of the city’s population. In addition to being banned from membership in churches, at best relegated to balconies and back pews, New York black residents endured curfews meeting prohibitions, and burial restrictions.

The graveyard was disinterred in the mid 19th century, and like most of the Lower East Side, tenements rose on the site. The tenements were eventually demolished, and a one block wide park was constructed from Houston Street down to Canal Street. In 1980 it was a fearful strip, entered by few but drug dealers and addicts. Today, it is an intensely used series of playgrounds with the M’Finda Kaunga garden as the only quiet oasis.

New York/Songwriting


David Massengill and Jack Hardy

Did some pictures yesterday for songwriters Jack Hardy and David Massengill who are doing a number of gigs together as the Folk Brothers (with a smirk). Jack has sometimes used an ancient typewriter as a symbol of his attitude toward writing songs–a craft rooted in old traditions, resistant to, though not situated wholly outside of, the modern world. I think the typewriters look a little like accordions in the photo.

David and Jack are two of the first people I met when I came to New York in 1977. David performs primarily on the dulcimer as unique accompaniment for his mostly narrative songs. He is, perhaps, best known for On the road to Fairfax County, which has been been recored by The Roches and Joan Baez. But that’s just the place to get started on David’s rich and varied collection of songs.