Eldridge Street (4×5 film)

Just getting around to scanning some earlier Lower East Side photographs including the view above of Eldridge Street in Chinatown.

Allen Street (4×5 film)

No more Polaroid and other digital issues

There are several interrelated things that are of great concern to me these days all related to changing technology. The first has to do with recent announcement that Polaroid has stopped producing 55 and 54 film along with the rest of their line of instant films. Polaroid 55 is a black and white peel apart negative/positive film, and 54 is a similar positive only film. I use these films routinely for architectural photography. Both are 4×5 sheet films.

Polaroid 55 is particularly useful for previewing interiors–B&W being ideal for seeing light and dark areas of the image– and helpful when doing lighting. Moreover, the negative is especially useful for seeing critical focus with a loupe. The negative grain is much sharper than the resolution of the print. I use Polaroid 54 mostly in the field for checking exposure and, occasionally, for the satisfaction of seeing an immediate image. It’s a little cheaper than Polaroid 55, though both films have gotten crazy expensive.

Now that production has stopped those of us who continue to use film are being forced by circumstances to change a tried and true method of work. A number of architectural photographers have already gone to digital cameras, and they usually bring a laptop with them to preview their work. There are several reasons I resist this route. One is that even the best 35mm digital camera (Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III) does not approach the resolution possible shooting analog and then scanning. I also don’t care for the wider 35mm frame. There are digital backs that go on medium format cameras–and even view cameras–but these are prohibitively expensive for photographers like myself. The Mark III is $8,000 for the body only. Phase One backs and the like cost tens of thousands of dollars. As it is, I just spent over $3,000 for a new dual processor Macintosh.

I also resist digital because I find carrying a laptop on a shoot one more thing to lug, and one more level of distraction. I currently use a light-weight ArcaSwiss view camera, pre-packaged film, and normally carry three lenses. All this fits in a backback, with the tripod hanging off the side, that I can carry around by myself. Although a laptop provides a wonderfully detailed image for previewing focus and composition, it has the potential to become a rather intrusive presence in an otherwise streamlined shooting/thinking process. That, I should acknowledge, however, is not a problem for either Albert Vecerka or Paul Warchol, who I spoke with the other night at the ASMP panel. (See earlier post). Both use digital cameras as their main tool, but occasionly go back to the 4×5 when needed.

I will have to see where things go for me. At the moment I use the same camera, same lenses, same film, same lab, and same scanner for everything–my fine art work and architectural assignments. The process has been working really well. Now, with Polaroid disappearing, I am being forced to re-evaluate. Photography has always marched in step with technological developments. There is no way that conventional color darkroom printing compares to what is possible using Photoshop, and few would want to go back. But in the camera/film area–image capture, if you will–technology is advancing faster than quality can keep up.

Soho Photo gallery, Tribeca

Last night I participated in an architectural photography panel discussion sponsored by the ASMP at Soho Photo on White Street, which is actually in Tribeca. There were four panelists: Paul Warchol, Albert Vecerka, Adrian Wilson, and myself. Paul is one of the most noted and successful architectural photographers in the field, and Albert is a younger, prodigiously talented ESTO photographer who assisted for me a number of times years ago.

Adrian Wilson, I wasn’t familiar with, but he seems to have arrived in New York from England a few years back, and has ended up working for all kinds of big clients, and claims to shoot interiors with one lens and no lights. His work has its punchy qualities, but I much prefer Paul and Albert’s photographs, which both exhibit great visual intelligence and sensitivity, even in the service of client assignments.

We each presented our work before a crowd of about 40 people, mostly photographers. I showed a quick overview of my architectural photo career as well as a few images from my art/documentary projects. Albert walked us through the process of several photo shoots including a series of photographs of the historic motel site and adjoining museum where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

The event was organized by Nicolai Froelich, who has assisted me on various photo shoots, and I think the whole thing came off rather well.

Behind my office on Stanton Street (a few days ago)

42nd Street and Fifth Avenue (4×5 film)

My life is a constant yo-yoing between mundane assignments and obligations, and extraordinary moments and opportunities. One is tempted, at times, to complain about the drudgery of less interesting work, but as I’ve found over the years, the extraordinary moments often spring without warning from those flat interludes.

Consider the picture above, which I think is a fine representation of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue at very heart of Midtown. Behind me is the Public Library and in the right is Chrysler Building towering over Grand Central Terminal. My assignment was to shoot the H&M store kitty corner across the intersection attempting to locate it at this famous spot. Earlier I had done a number of closer pictures that described the storefront well, but didn’t say much about the location.

While making one of the closer views, an elevation of the store windows while several window dressers adjusted the manniquins (a nice bit of unplanned activity), a man stopped and we chatted briefly. He had an interest in large format photography and was glad to see that I was still using a view camera. He did pictures himself, usually of architecture in Turkey and eastern Europe, and, in fact, was headed to Bulgaria the next day. I just barely caught his name as he dashed off down 42nd Street.

I then crossed Fifth Avenue, and as the light began to fall, I discovered the view above from the elevated terrace in front of the Public Library. This was where I should have been looking from the beginning.

Later, when I got home, I Googled the name of the person I had spoken to on the street–Steve Lewis–and discovered that he was an architectural historian, urban planner, writer, translator, Fulbright scholar, and on and on. He had lived in the Netherlands for years, as I had, and grew up on the Lower East Side, the neighborhood that has been at the center of my life in New York. I e-mailed him, and because his trip to Bulgaria was postponed, we met in a café the next day and had a most enjoyable conversation about photography, architecture, and life in the Netherlands.

It’s a cliché to say that photography is about serendipity. Usually, it refers to catching something in the split second of an exposure. But for me, it’s about chance events much more broadly defined: like the opening of the Berlin Wall in the midst of my project photographing the Iron Curtain, or much more prosaically, an encounter in the flow of people and cars on a familiar corner while shooting an H&M clothing store.

Regent University/Christian Broadcasting Network

Continuing to photograph megachurches and other contemporary religious structures. One of the most influential such institutions is Pat Robertson’s 700 Club (Christian Broadcasting Network) and Regent Unversity located in Virginia Beach. Both the broadcasting operation and school are located on a campus just off of Interstate 64. The campus is comprised of a collection of large colonial style buildings set in a well-tended, often beautiful, landscape. The buildings evoke Virginia heritage, but are grossly out of scale–classicism on steroids. I did several pictures of the communications building with a bevy of CBN satellite dishes off to one side.

Rock Church

Although the majority of megachurches are located in the new suburbs, or exurban areas of American cities, a significant number are found in older suburbs or near downtown. Rock Church is in a somewhat more mature suburban area of Virginia Beach. It’s hard to talk about Virginia Beach as a conventional city. It was originally a beach front town to the east of Norfolk, but eventually white flight and others forces of suburbanization turned it into the state’s largest city. It lacks a center, and although there are beautiful neighborhoods, much of the city can be described as sprawl.

Rock Church is a large structure, and apparently replaces an earlier domed hall a block away. It stands directly opposite a public school and their parking lots, more or less, run together. A waterfall gushes into a small pond out front. The stars and stripes flew at half mast when I was there, I think in memory of their pastor who had recently died.

Atlantic Shores Baptist Church

Not far from Regent University I photographed around Atlantic Shores Baptist Church, which stands across from a shopping center and a new apartment complex. Unlike the other places I’ve visited Atlantic Shores actually displays a cross on a central tower, which makes it more immediately recognizable as a religious complex. It’s a somewhat scruffy property with temporary buildings and a broad grassy field that appears to be used for parking when needed. I did one picture looking across the field, and a couple of views from the apartment complex with the cross rising up in the distance.

Driving around Virginia Beach I came across London Bridge Bridge Baptist Church, which features a huge conventional church front with box-like sanctuary tucked behind. I don’t have a digital photo to show, but I took several pictures with the view camera, one from the neighborhood across the street. I ended the day at Wave Church, which is in the process of constructing a decidedly unchurch like extension. This glass curtain walled building called the Wave Convention Center could easily fit into a corporate office park.

Wave Church with Wave Convention Center under construction

Here’s what it says on their website:

WAVE CONVENTION CENTER

Once completed, WCC will be a 90,000 square foot 2,500 seat auditorium, with every seat having a great view of the stage. It will feature a built-in baptismal pool, beautiful new screens for media and a stage for Worship & Creative Arts. There will be plenty of room for conferences, productions, Christmas and Easter services, Hillsong nights, etc. WCC will aslo provide plenty of alter space for people to respond to the call of the Kingdom, as people stream to Christ.

The foyer will serve many purposes. The 1st floor will offer an express-line bookshop, coffee shop and information area. The 2nd floor will provide a destination bookshop and a coffee shop where people can stop to read, buy a coffee or snack and connect to the internet via WI-FI. The 3rd floor will provide much needed office space for our pastors and staff. As we continue to grow, we want the quality of our Pastoral Care to grow as well. The building itself will also provide 10 restrooms, including 26 men’s and 38 women’s stalls. This is a significant increase.

But of course, it’s not about the bricks and mortar…

Williamsburg Community Chapel

Back in Williamsburg where I was visiting my father, I photographed the Williamsburg Community Chapel, which has just about completed a major new extension. This church sits in the woods off of route 5, a beautiful highway between Williamsburg and Richmond. The area around the church is rapidly growing, and the woods are fast disappearing. Like so many of these large churches, the parking lot is the primary feature of the landscape; empty much of the time.

I photographed the new side of the church with entrance portico and parking lot in the foreground. Many of the houses in the neighborhood nearby were empty, but I don’t know if that’s the result of the current housing slowdown seen across the country, or just the normal turnaround time for new houses.

Pierce’s Pitt Bar-B-Que, Williamsburg, Virginia

I began my short stay in Williamsburg with a meal at Pierce’s Pitt Bar-B-Que. Pierce’s has been around forever, and specializes in melt-in-the-mouth pork sandwiches. I had this:

JC’S SPECIAL $7.25
This Popular “Jumbo” sandwich – 5 oz. of our famous pulled pork bar-b-que in “Doc” Pierce’s Original Bar-B-Que Sauce, layered with our homemade slaw. Comes with regular drink, french fries, and homebaked cookie.

Pierce’s is a roadside shack, but an upgraded shack. Kind of bright with lots of orange accent color, it’s not really an atmosphere for lingering. Truck drivers mingle with the local folks. There are nice pictures on the walls of earlier, even more modest, versions of the restaurant. Williamsburg has always been a schizophrenic place. You’ve got the college crowd, Colonial Williamsburg, and now, wealthy retirees. But there’s always been a rural element, both white and black, vestiges of the old south. There are people who’d never go to the colonial restoration, but go wild over the Pottery Factory, a vast emporium of cheap crockery and goo gaws for the home. Pierce’s Pitt Bar-b-que caters to both sides of town.

Check out their website and don’t miss the scrapbook. See the famous–and infamous–politicians seeking authenticity by visiting Pierce’s.

Pierce’s Pitt Bar-B-Que

I had already mapped a number of megachurches (my new photo project) in the Hampton Roads area, and two were close to each other just off Mercury Boulevard. When I was a teenager Mercury Boulevard was the place to go for a movie, shopping at the mall, and concerts at the Coliseum. I even bought my first guitar on Mercury Boulevard in a shop housed in a small bungalow along the service road, obviously built long before the present ten lanes of blacktop.

Today the street is–let’s not mince words here–a horror. It exhibits everything that is wrong in America’s obsessive car culture, but more than that, it doesn’t even function well in that context. I remember when they built Coliseum Mall with a one lane flyover funneling traffic to the parking lot. The flyover flies no more, and the mall has been demolished. It is being replaced by a new-fangled ye olde mall, just as big with the same endless parking lots, but with touches of faux main street frillery.

Bethel Temple, Hampton, Virginia

Bethel Temple is a domed flying saucer shaped object across from its own parking lot and a BP gas station. An empty field with a grouping of trees that once must have surrounded a house lies diagonally across. I parked in the lot of a nearby shopping center and took several shots from directly across the street and from some distance away. Like a lot of these churches it’s an assemblage of buildings revealing the growth of the church from, usually, humble beginnings.

R.O.C.K. Ministries and Bethel Temple in rear

In sight, just up the street near Mercury Boulevard a tiny church called the R.O.C.K. (Restoration of Christ’s Kingdom) Ministries occupies a small building along with its affiliated businesses: Dora’s Drycleaning, Performance Haircutting (waxing by Jeannie), and Studio 5 (photography).

Liberty Baptist Church

A couple of miles away is Liberty Baptist Church, a sprawling campus with very new looking buildings. I stayed off the grounds–maybe later when I get more confident about what I’m doing I’ll walk in and and ask to take photographs. I did several photographs from the street with lots of grass in the foreground. The buildings are low slung making it hard to get a sense of the form of the structures. There’s a large port-cochere in front, which is, from what I’ve seen, common with megachurches. Basically, the place looks like a community college or hospital.

Houses near Liberty Baptist Church

A small neighborhood of new houses stands adjacent, directly across from the front door. I made one photograph with the houses in the foreground and the church just visible beyond the fence at rear. If you lived here, even though the church is right behind your house, you’d probably drive. It’s a long way around, and just not a walking environment.

From the taxi window on he way to Penn Station

Headed to Virginia for several days–began what I hope will be a new project, photographing megachurches and the landscapes around them. I decided to begin in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia because it is the home of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (700 Club) and Regent College. While not a megachurch, the campus is a major center of power in the evangelical movement.

Pictures coming up.

It was also an opportunity to look in on my father who is in an assisted living facility in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Wonder Wheel, Coney Island (4×5 film)

The sublimely tawdry Astroland and Deno’s Wonder Wheel will, apparently, live for one more season. What happens next is uncertain. One thing for sure, three landmarked structures will remain–the Parachute Jump, the Cyclone roller coaster, and the Wonder Wheel.

Rummaging through my archive I found the picture above. Had to be early 1990s. I can’t tell much from the clothing. I was shooting a few Brooklyn icons for a client. Somewhere in my boxes, I believe, there is a 20×24 print of this image.

Amster Yard/Instituto Cervantes (4×5 film)
East 49th Street between Second and Third Avenues

Been busy the last few days shooting for the Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish cultural institute, which occupies a group of small buildings that surround the Amster Yard. The Amster Yard is a rare thing in New York, a courtyard/garden tucked into the middle of a block, open to the public.

New York Times article about the restoration of the space.

Apparently, the work entailed the complete rebuilding of several structures around the garden rather than actual restoration. In the Netherlands, where I livd part time for 15 years, I saw a completely different attitude about restoration of historic buildings than in New York. It was common for historic structures to be meticulously rebuilt from the ground up, sometimes at the cost of the patina of age. On the other hand, in New York, there is a tendency to sentimentalize the past–perhaps because it disappears so quickly–although there is now a willingness to accomodate the immediate juxtapostion of new and old.

In any case, the Amster Yard, along with the activities of the Instituto Cervantes, is a welcome oasis open to the public on East 49th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.

Houston/Lafayette Street

Sheridan Square/Seventh Avenue

Looking up.

The New Museum

Without comment.

The Bowery and Grand Street (4×5 film)

The Bowery, which is the western boundary of the Lower East Side, has gotten a lot of attention since the recent opening of the New Museum. It’s the last frontier of lower Manhattan, already greatly transformed, though Chinatown continues to resist change.

The Bowery and East Fifth Street (4×5 film)

Houston and Bowery (4×5 film)

Going through my LES negatives I realized that I had enough images of the Bowery to make it a project within a project. So, I’ve done up some new web pages. No text or anything as this point. I’m not sure what I want to say. I haven’t yet linked to my main site. Anyway, take a look.

http://www.brianrose.com/bowery/bowery.htm

Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan
Lots of milling about and reading explanatory labels.

I went to the Metropolitan Museum yesterday to check out two photography exhibits that have been up for a while. The most prominent of the two–at least in terms of publicity and location–is Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan, which occupies a new gallery dedicated to contemporary photography. As is usual of group shows, it is primarily about photography, as opposed to a show of photography. Above all, it is a curators show, a staking out of turf, a doctoral thesis, if you will, that the rest of us, perhaps, shouldn’t have to be subjected to.

Pixellated World Trade Center image by Thomas Ruff

The exhibition introductory text lays out the tired–for me anyway–premise that the past 40 years have been chiefly about experimentation, the breaking down of boundaries, and the blurring of “the line between reality and the imagination.” And naturally, that digitalization has rendered analog photography almost obsolete. The lineup of artists/photographers offered as evidence of all this is largely comprised of the same names one encounters over and over in commercial galleries and other museums. (Bechers, Sherman, Ruff, Struth, Gursky, Dijkstra, etc.)

There are also a number of artists included who only use photography tangentially like Dennis Oppenheim and Gordon Matta-Clark, which is obviously supposed to make a point about photography’s extended reach into conceptual, performance, and installation art. Not a particularly novel idea. I appreciate, more, how Adam Fuss’s large photogram evokes the most basic elements of photography, light and shadow.

Granted there are some nice images in the show–though few that I haven’t seen elsewhere–and many of the photographers deserve the attention they’ve gotten, but… I guess I’m exhausted of having “the old new” shoved down my throat, and I’m yearning for a fresher perspective on where we are, or might be going.

Untitled, Sharon Lockhart

Rodney Graham’s upside down tree seen right side up in the display case reflection.

Intro text:

The hallucinatory clarity of Rodney Graham’s upside-down tree, Sharon Lockhart’s reflection-filled hotel room, and Uta Barth’s luminous river view are all, nevertheless, rooted in an exploration of analog photography’s unique technical and material underpinnings, pushed to the point of a bedazzled transcendence.

Okay. Maybe. Analog is all right as long as it’s transcendent. I left the gallery and began looking for the Lee Friedlander exhibition that I knew was nearby. I saw that the main photo/print galleries were closed for a show change, so I wandered out into the European sculpture gallery filed with Rodins and the like, and still I couldn’t find Friedlander. Finally, I came across a little sign pointing toward a doorway with the word “Photographs” printed on it. Ah, this must be the place.

Friedlander must be around here somwhere.

Inside was Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks, the result of many years of his project photographing the landscapes of Frederick Law Olmsted. Let me say right up front, as someone who has spent a lot of time photographing in Central Park and Prospect Park–both Olmsted masterpieces–that Friedlander’s photographs have little to do with Olmsted or the particular design aspects of these landscapes. These pictures are visual journeys into the strange and unfamiliar, or to borrow from John MacPhee, into “suspect terrain.”

Sparsely visited “hidden” gallery.

As is well known, Friedlander’s early work dealt with the social landscape, street photography, and the bric-a-brac of pop culture all around us. He was in love with advertising signs, crazy juxtapositions, objects near and far, reflections, the great jumble of stuff in the world all held together by a spider’s web of compositional tension. Sometimes his work encompassed social criticism as in his pictures of factory workers, a disturbing series of photographs of humanity at the mercy of machinery and the drudgery of manual labor.

Later, when Friedlander turned to the natural landscape, albeit man-made landscape, he began to explore the idea of making photographs emptied of the cultural touchstones integral to his earlier work. These pictures rather than losing their power probe deeply into the visual wilderness of pure imagery. Friedlander consciously sought out this wilderness in the semi-civilized landscape of Olmsted. I know from my own experience that Olmsted’s landscapes, while natural in appearance, are highly ordered compositions with carefully framed vistas and hierarchical progressions through space. Friedlander is not really interested in these aspects of Olmsted. He uses Olmsted’s order for his own purposes.

Friedlander trees.

These photographs, as I read them, push the act of making pictures into uncharted territory, both terrible and beautiful. Trees loom as anthropomorphic beings throwing apples at Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road. Shadows splay over layer upon layer of bare branches obscuring any way of escape. A complex rippling and dappling of sunlight projected onto leaves and stones obliterates recognition. Throughout these pictures Friedlander utilizes the compositional devices of his older work, but even though the moves are familiar, I find myself led into a disorienting world, shimmering with light, where boulders and trees are made ephemeral, and Olmsted’s ordered space is shattered.

Call it “bedazzled transcendence.”

Strand Bookstore, 12th Street and Broadway

The one and only.

Litchfield, Connecticut

While on a family ski jaunt to the Berkshires we stopped in Litchfield, Connecticut for dinner, and I walked across the town green to photograph the church above. It was 9 degrees fahrenheit so I didn’t spend a lot of time on this.

I’ve long been interested in beginning a new project with the working title of the New Religious Landscape. It would primarily focus on the phenonmenon of megachurches and the surrounding environment. New England churches serve as a reference point–classical, unadorned, dignified statements usually found in the center of villages–that point to attitudes about community, architecture and planning, and the place of religion in society.

This church in Litchfield is actually a 1929 reconstruction of the original, which was built a hundred years before. The earlier building was replaced when religious fashion changed later in the 19th century. It was only well into the 20th century when public taste began to value colonial and neo-colonial architecture that the original design was returned to its former prominence in the center of town.

Houston Street

All over town there are posters for the movie Cloverfield depicting a ruined lower Manhattan. For those of living downtown (or anywhere?) the images are chilling reminders of what happened in 2001. Is making a movie like this shameless exploitation? Yes. Should one avoid seeing it? Yes.

Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building

Without comment.

East 1st Street/Bowery/Houston Street

I’m working on a series of pictures of the Bowery taken over the past few years as an adjunct to my Lower East Side project. The picture above was taken during the demolition of the AvalonBay development site bounded by the East 1st Street, The Bowery, and Houston Street.

The single building standing is 295 Bowery, infamous as the location of McGurk’s Suicide Hall, where a number of prostitutes were said to have ended their lives by swallowing acid. That was in the late 1890s long before the street had reached its most desolate nadir as skid row. The history of the building is nicely told by Rob Hill on his website.

In its last days, artists, most notably feminist author and artist Kate Millet lived there. She and others were relocated to make way for approximately 600 apartments built on both sides of Houston Street–very expensive rentals–with 20 percent of the units reserved for low income residents. Newcomers to the neighborhood are mostly unaware that the redevelopment of this site was part of a deal made with the community to rehabilitate and preserve another 600 units of low cost tenement housing on several adjacent blocks.

The Bowery Mission and New Museum

Yesterday, the temperature soared into the 60s, so I took the opportunity to do more Lower East Side pictures. I left my apartment/office on Stanton Street and began walking down the Bowery stopping to do a photograph of the Bowery Mission adjacent to the New Museum. There are few facilities ministering to the homeless and addicted left in the neighborhood, but this is one of the oldest, and it continues to provide meals and other services even as the flophouses and bars have vanished.

The Bowery and Hester Street

I walked through the lighting district to the south of Delancey/Kenmare Street. There used to be many such unofficial markets in Manhattan–the flower district in the West 20s, the radio district obliterated by the World Trade Center, the restaurant supply area of the Bowery hanging by a thread–but gradually they’ve been dispersed at a loss to the diversity of the city. At Grand Street, the Bowery has been subsumed into the ever expanding Chinatown, which has grown north and east further into the Lower East Side. On the corner of Hester a large site has been cleared for new construction, a tacky glass tower pictured on a sign on the construction fence. I did a series of shots here with the 4×5 camera.

Eldridge Street Synogogue

I then walked east on Hester and then downtown on Eldridge to the Eldridge Street Synogogue that I visited a few weeks ago. The late 19th century structure has been restored and functions now in part as a museum. It is surrounded by the visual cacophany of Chinatown, a scene I’ve been trying, with mixed success, to get into a photograph. Today, I tried again, timing my arrival for the low winter sun raking just above the nearby Manhattan Bridge. I got up on a rather high stoop of a tenement opposite the synagogue and did two wide views of the synogogue showing adjacent buildings. I also did a photograph looking north through layers of signs with Chinese lettering.

Eldridge Street

A tourist came by holding a Time Out guide gazing up at the building. As we chatted, it struck me how much this scene was an echo of the old Lower East Side when people jammed the streets and sidewalks, commerce of every description was carried out in the open, and when there was a density of sights, noises and smells that filled the senses.

East Broadway and Pike Street

I walked around several blocks in this area photographing various storefronts as the light began to fade. At Canal and Eldridge a large 19th century building was being demolished–another development site.

The project continues. Today I sent out 200 postcards to galleries, museums, and individuals. Book? Exhibit? Website for now.