Sporting the Green

 

  Happy St. Patrick's Day, 2014

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I grew up in a household where the only formally acknowledged holidays were Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. (Birthdays were noted, but without much fanfare.) Anything beyond these was considered either patently frivolous or unworthy of attention because it was probably a contrivance of the greeting card industry.

This is probably why I showed up at the 47^th Annual Ocean View St. Patrick’s Day Parade without so much as a stitch of green clothing on me.

One afternoon in 1967, so the story goes, a couple of guys sitting around at the Ocean View Knights of Columbus clubhouse wondered:

"Why don’t we have a parade to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?"

And so they did. This past Saturday’s was the 47^th Ocean View St. Patrick’s Day Parade. (Yes, I know Saturday wasn’t really St. Patrick’s Day. Ocean View residents, though, are working people. On Monday they’ll be back at the shipyard, the Navy base or any of a thousand other jobs where you don’t get the day off.)

 The Grands, 2014

 Over the years I’ve photographed at a lot of parades. The first thing you need to know about this one is that it’s not about the parade. Sure, there are the predictable flags and floats, princesses, clowns, police and fire vehicles and Shriners in their go karts and hillbilly jug bands. And in this case you add in robed Knights of Columbus, Hibernian heritage claimants, step dancers and even a group of Scots playing bagpipes. 

 

 The Family that Wears Green Together, 2014

It’s the pride of the people who come to watch this parade, though, that makes this one special. It’s their parade, not something the tourism or economic development folks foisted on them. Virginia Beach’s Neptune Festival Parade has fancier floats and more music. Downtown Norfolk’s Christmas Parade has more lights. The Greening of Ghent probably has more hipsters. But for unabashed pride of place, it’s hard to beat Ocean View.

Ocean View gets a bad rap sometime, especially if your barometer of civic health is the police blotter. It’s true that it’s more desirable sections along the Chesapeake Bay are getting gentrified. But the people who come out for this parade are mostly long-time residents, people who raised their kids there and are proud to stand up for their community.

Hours ahead of the parade’s starting time spectators start staking out places along its route. Tailgaters fill the grassy median between the lanes of Granby Street. Residents along the route set up chairs and tables on their porches or lean out their second floor windows with cameras.

And no matter how rich or poor or young or old or black or white, they all come decked out in green. 

 

 Bring on the Irish Men!, 2014

 I’d never attended this parade before. When I first thought about photographing the parade this year, I thought I’d be shooting pictures of floats and bands. But in the end the photographs that I enjoy the most are the photographs of the people.

As for all the color, a day spent here could put you off green for while. 

 "I'm not Irish. But I like beer and jugs." 2014

When Does Interest Become Obsession?

Beatrice Homestead, 2005

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After I commented the other day that I always try to have some kind of camera with me, my Flickr friend Jen asked:

“Why do we always wish we had a camera? Why is it so hard to enjoy [the experience of seeing something] just for the experience it is? Is it our desire to share, or maybe to remember, or just to capture the beauty of nature and the nature of beauty?”

I can only address Jen’s questions from my own experience, which, the more I think about it, the more I question just how mentally healthy my response sounds.

But here it is:

What I tell myself, at least, is that I don’t want to miss a chance at what might be a meaningful photograph.

You know how it goes. You find yourself faced with conditions that make for a transcendent visual moment. But you don’t have a camera. #^$@!!**^!

Here’s where we venture into the realm of the obsessive. I sometimes get very frustrated, even unable to enjoy the experience of something, if I don’t have a camera.

If I don’t capture some artifact of that transcendent visual moment—and, to be honest, it doesn’t have to be all that transcendent—there’s a very good chance I’ll forget it. My brain’s a crowded place. I need notes and pictures and recordings.

The nice part of this is that when I see those notes and pictures or hear those recorded sounds again, I’m back in the moment. The sound of swallows will always take me back to Florence. The smell of a roasting chicken covered with garlic will take me back to Los Caracoles in Barcelona. A photo of the rugged California coast will recall the wind against my face in Big Sur.

If I don’t have those artifacts to jog my memory, it’s as if I wasn’t there. I won’t forget I was there. It’s just that I won’t have much command over the details of those memories that made those experiences so rich.

As a child I experienced a lot of unhappiness and depression. I developed ways of compartmentalizing unhappy experiences and feelings. This willful forgetfulness protected me. But it also made it very hard for me to be open to the full richness of experience until I was well into my twenties. Only then, and in the company of new and trusted fiends, could I let the walls down between experience and me.

Many years later now, I’m slaphappy about experiencing simple things. To answer Jen’s question, I can be mindful and enjoy “the beauty of nature and the nature of beauty.” But I still feel I’ve missed out on something if I don’t bring home some of that moment with me.

As for the photograph above, when the camera I had with me in Beatrice, Nebraska, when I first tried to make this photograph broke, I went to the closest store and bought another one. How’s that for obsession?

Looking at Up from Down

 

Let's Dance, 2014

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Back in 2007 I made a series ofphotographs of things “at my feet” when I took my daily walk. I normally walked before sunrise in those days and only noticed when one Saturday morning I started my walk later in the day that the seemingly quiet suburban streets in my neighborhood were teeming with various utility markings.

I don’t walk that early any more. But most days when it’s over 40F I do get out at some point during the day and walk at least five miles. The actual time of day varies according to my work schedule, travel, etc.

I’m a proponent of always having a camera handy, even if it’s just a cell phone camera. Every now and then, though, I forgot this and almost immediately regret it as soon as I hit the street.

Last Saturday afternoon I didn’t have a camera with me when I walked. It killed me when I didn’t have a way of capturing images of some of the things I saw, particularly shadows on the street. So you can be sure that when I walked the next day I had the iPhone and its camera with me.

A lot of people getting into photography start by looking up at the sky. To be honest, an empty blue sky can be boring. But clouds are so available and so interesting when you start paying attention to them. Photographers know there’s nothing that will add drama to a landscape photograph quite like a dynamic sky. 

 Walking Hand in Hand, 2014

Sunday was one of those days where the sky was clear and blue. But that was okay because what caught me eye was what was happening in the ground at my feet; namely, the shadows cast by the sun. 

The idea with recreational walking is that it’s less harmful to aging joints than, say, running. But you still want to build up enough steam to get some cardiovascular benefit. What I do isn’t to be confused with race walking, that silly looking strut where you keep your hands up by your chest and swivel your butt back and forth like a duck. I look ratty enough when I walk. I don’t need any additional reason for people to confuse me with a duck. 

 They Went Into the Storm Wide and Came Out Thin, 2014

To move things along, let’s just say that after loosening up I build up to a purposeful pace. But on Sunday that was hard to do because I kept stopping to photograph shapes and shadows I saw on the street. I’d get humming along and then come to an abrupt stop to capture the image of something I saw on the street. In other words, not much momentum or steam being built up. This went on for a good forty-five minutes, and I must confess that it was actually a relief when the phone’s battery died and I couldn’t take any more pictures.

I like the images I caught. But I tell you this: being an observational photographer is hell on your health.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, 2014

After the Crowds Have Gone

 

 Last Call, 2014

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One of the things about getting older is that you begin to realize that you’ve seen it all before. Or, if not all, at least a good part of it. It’s like the other night when, in the course of talking about a book I was reading, my sister-in-law told me there are only thirteen basic plots in all of literature. I don’t know if that’s true. But in my time I’ve seen neckties get wider, then slimmer, the wider again and yet slimmer again. I’ve seen cars get big and then small and then big again. I’ve watched a dozen artistic fads come and go. I’ve watched at least three generations “discover” the Beatles.

In the 1970s, real estate developer James Rouse conceived of a new “third place” concept—the “festival marketplace”—as a tool for revitalizing downtowns and doing social good. Boston’s Faneuil Hall was one of the first, and so successful that it quickly spawned others all over the country. (The social good element was that profits from these places would underwrite affordable quality housing in poor neighborhoods.)

In June of 1983, the “Waterside” festival marketplace opened in Norfolk, Virginia. It had all the usual festival marketplace elements—restaurants and food stalls, specialty retailers, activities for people of all ages. It was a beautiful structure overlooking the busy Norfolk harbor. From Waterside’s terrace you might see a gleaming cruise ship positioning into a drydock across the river, a towering aircraft carrier or a submarine gliding by on their way to the Naval Shipyard and other ships, yachts, tugboats and barges. Even Staten Island ferries, lately.

Harbor View, 2014

Waterside was an immediate success. It drew hundreds of thousands of locals and tourists to the formerly abandoned downtown waterfront to dine, shop and be entertained.

James Rouse knew, though, that these places wouldn’t work if the were treated like shopping centers. Rather, the differentiating characteristic of festival marketplaces was their element of serendipity.

It’s true. As long as Waterside held to this model, the crowds came. One night in the main hall you might find a competition between rock bands. Another you might find twenty-seven sailors from the Danish Navy singing and dancing to folk songs. The important thing is that you just didn’t know what you’d find when you went to Waterside. So you’d go there a lot to experience that serendipity.

Only Waterside forgot about this. When the first management team—headed by a former theme park manager—finished the job of getting Waterside up and running, their successors came from commercial real estate property management. Their experience was running shopping centers, so that’s how they treated Waterside. Good-bye serendipity. 

No More Orders, 2014

 The momentum from the opening year was so strong that people continued to come for a while after the serendipity was gone. But eventually they stopped coming. And eventually the only tenants the City could find were bars where violence became a problem. In time, the City evicted even them.

Waterside succeeded in rejuvenating downtown Norfolk. It paved the way for hundreds of millions of dollars of other development that continues to thrive. But Waterside itself became a ghost town. Most of the second floor was closed and covered up. Where there used to be chairs and benches on the main floor that could be moved around to accommodate spontaneous needs, today there are tables and seats bolted to the floor, as if you were in a prison or mall. 

 

No One's There, 2014

 Waterside will soon be turned over to a company that promises to refashion the place into what at first blush sounds a combination of video arcades and chain restaurants.

Hopefully I’m being too harsh. I want the new operators to succeed. But I haven’t heard anyone use a word like “serendipity” yet to describe what Waterside will become. And that makes me skeptical.

On View

Bethesda Terrace - 219, 2013

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I am of the generation raised to think that you’re not a legitimate artist until you’ve had a “show” at a gallery where people stand around on a Friday night wearing turtlenecks, swill wine and admire your work.

I’ve never had a gallery show. I’ve been in a few, but none that were just about me. I’m not complaining, though. I haven’t been diligent in pursuing such exposure. Besides, I have the vacuum tubes of the Internet to keep me warm.

For over ten years I’ve been posting photographs almost every day at one or another online sites, the idea being that if I post something every day by the end of the year I’ll have at least a few photographs I think are worth something.

That’s been pretty much the case. The unexpected consequence is that doing so has also connected me with a large community of kindred souls. To be honest, this kinship has been the best part. But the visibility’s not bad, either. My “art,” such as it is, is seen by far more people every day than could ever see it in a gallery.

Take this past week. More than six hundred people have asked to see what I’m doing on a daily basis. Under normal circumstances, the number who actually click on the thumbnail-sized images to see them larger is much smaller, around a hundred.

But this past week two of my photographs were featured on Flickr’s “Explore” page, where photographs that some faceless Flickr employee or computer algorithm think is worth presenting on a larger stage gets shown. The payoff is that the number of people who are exposed to your is huge. In the case of the photo above, more than fourteen sixteen eighteen nineteen twenty thousand people have clicked on it to see it larger.

That’s no small crowd. And even though they might have been sitting in their pajamas in Paris, Seoul, St. Petersburg or Cincinnati instead dressed up in their best turtleneck at a gallery on a Friday night, their recognition and kind thoughts are no less affirming. We’re all sharing, enjoying and learning from each other, and along the way creating a community that makes us all much better global citizens

(For all of the vanity of thinking that the popularity of the image shown above is all because of something I did, I’m of the sneaky suspicion that this photo was inspired, however, subconsciously, by Eugene Smith’s A Walk to the Paradise Garden from his Smith's 1955 Family of Man show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. )

@ Patchin Place

 

Patchin Place, 2013

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In New York City near the intersection of West 10^th Street and 6^th Avenue (aka Avenue of the Americas) are two little glimpses into mid-19^th Century life. Milligan Place, entered through a narrow gap between two buildings on 6^th Avenue, and Patchin Place, which runs off West 10th Street, are both small gated residential enclaves. They’re extremely desirable and expensive addresses in today’s real estate market because of their location, quietness and quaintness.

But it wasn’t always that way. Milligan Place and Patchin Place were both built around 1850 to house servants—mostly Basque immigrants—working at a nearby hotel. 

Throughout much of the 1900s, Greenwich Village was a hive of creative and bohemian life. The apartments at Patchin Place were popular with artists and writers, including Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes and John Reed. (Today, Patchin Place is famous for the number of psychotherapists who live there.)

A close family friend of my parents when I was growing up, the painter, illustrator and author Shane Miller, lived for many years with his wife at Patchin Place. Shane Miller was an easy-going self-described elf of an Irishman. In his lifetime, Shane pursued many spiritual paths, and along the way also illustrated cartoons for Warner Brothers (where composer Hoagy Carmichael was his creative partner), painted portraits and wrote and illustrated books about the history of New York City, Rome and Athens. Shane was serious when it came to his work. But as a friend he had a wonderful humor and a smile that warmed all who knew him.

Everyone, that is, except for his Patchin Place neighbor, the poet e.e.cummings, with whom Shane and his wife shared a fire escape that was also the passageway used to take their garbage down to the street.

For most of us, e.e. cummings is best known as a poet whose work is immediately identifiable by its exclusive use of lower case letters. As a neighbor in Patchin Place during the 1940s and 1950s, though, cummings was best known for his hard drinking and general crankiness, which is saying something considering that just about everyone living at Patchin Place in those days was known for his or her excessive and idiosyncratic behavior.

e.e. cummings didn’t have much to do with his neighbors at Patchin Place. He and Shane never shared a social drink, a nibble of food, a war story or complained about publishers.

The only time cummings ever spoke to Shane occurred late one night when the two men found themselves taking out the trash at the same time. Shane greeted his neighbor on the way down the fire escape, but got no response. On the way back up, cummings paused only long enough to touch Shane’s shoulder and tell him, “Your wife’s sure got a big ass.”

Of Thee I Sing Sing

 Welcome to Sing Sing, 2013

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In the pursuit of physical fitness, something interesting to photograph and the opportunity to take my daughter’s dog for a walk, I have once again run afoul of the local constabulary. Only where in the past it’s been US Navy sentries in gummy boats racing across the harbor to keep me from photographing submarines or Homeland Security agents stopping me from photographing scenes that hundreds of tourists photograph every day, this time it was the screws at Sing Sing prison.

We spent the Thanksgiving holiday with new friends and family who live in a historic neighborhood on the edge of Ossining, New York. (If that name rings a bell, it might be because the fictitious Don and Betty Draper of Man Men lived in Ossining.)

You can’t be in this area and not know there’s a big prison in the center of town. And not just a big prison, but a famous one. Sing Sing, if you haven’t heard of it, is a maximum-security prison just north of New York City. It was built (much of it by inmates, presumably under careful supervision) during the early 1800s. Sing Sing's so famous in American correctional lore that, as the historical market at the entrance proclaims, it's the place that inspired terms like “up the river,” “big house” and “last mile.”

Even by the serious standards of prison architecture, Sing Sing’s a pretty bleak place. It’s gray stone and brick buildings ramble from the top of a bluff down to the Hudson River shoreline. The cement wall that surrounds the prison is tall and as intimidating on the outside as it must be on the inside.

 

No Parking. No Escape. 2013

My crime, such as it was, was that Hope (the dog) and I didn’t realize that as we walked purposely down Hudson Street through a quiet residential neighborhood we’d unwittingly, and without any warning or further ado, stepped onto the prison grounds.

I photographed the historic plaques mounted outside the prison wall and walked a good mile or so around the eastern perimeter of the prison, stopping occasionally to photograph guard towers or interesting textures in the prison wall. It wasn’t until I’d gotten around to the northern side of the prison that a guard stepped out of a watchtower and yelled down to me to stop taking pictures.

Under normal circumstances I might have protested that I was standing on a public street photographing a scene that is visible from dozens of neighboring homes and two or three major local streets. But the guard was standing thirty feet or so above me and had a shotgun in his hand. All I had was a camera and a dog.

And as it turns out, I wasn’t even standing on a public street any more.

A more observant guy would have noticed that there were several signs posted at the entrance to the prison grounds indicating that it’s illegal to make unauthorized photographs on the prison grounds. I, on the other hand, was too focused on some of the famous people—e.g. mobsters “Lucky” Luciano and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Ruth Snyder, Willie Sutton and “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz—who’ve resided on the other side of the wall.

Let’s just say I put the cap on my camera lens and walked back to the house by another route. Wouldn’t have been any fun to get tossed in the big house. 

 

The Illusion of an Escape Route, 2013