Judgement Day

If You Wanna Take a Picture, You Need to Talk to Tito, 2003

I’m hoping to participate in a photography workshop this summer taught by a famous photographer. Before you can enroll, though, you have to submit a portfolio. I suppose this allows the school to make sure I wouldn’t be wasting the famous photographer’s time. (They say it’s to merely demonstrate that I “know my way around a camera.”)

From time to time I’ve put together collections of my photography. But they’ve almost always been done with specific interests or themes in mind. This time they’re asking simply for samples of my “best work.”

I understand the instruction. But I’m honestly stumped as to what to show them. It’s funny how critical you become of your own work when you know it’s going to be judged by people whose taste you don’t know much about, but who you know are used to seeing really good work every day. All of a sudden, nothing looks very good.

My first thought was to put together a selection of photographs of people. But that’s the very kind of work I’m trying to improve in this workshop. Besides, the review committee’s advisor representative recommended that I not do that. So instead I’ve come up with a formula I hope will work: 1/3 “sense of place” photos, 1/3 people photos and 1/3 concept photos, with a healthy mix of color and b&w in each group.

Try culling years of photographs down to your best fifteen. It’s much harder than it sounds. But I’m doing it because I have to, even if it means tossing out lots of photographs that I thought were especially smart and engaging in their original series context, but that don’t stand up on their own when taken out of context.

Balancing some of the pain of this process has been the joy of going back through my photographs. It’s like revisiting old friends, and because photographs are rarely just about the visual record of the moment to me, revisiting them recalls all the other sensory memories, as well.

Like this photo, above. My wife and daughter and I had just stepped out of a New York theater matinee and were immediately engulfed by a crowd of Puerto Rico Day celebrants. It was a hot and humid summer afternoon that smelled of a mixture of overcooked street food and the ozone from an approaching thunderstorm. There was wonderful music everywhere. I’d have normally stayed on the sidelines and photographed from afar. But instead I stepped out into the street and mingled with members of the parade. I wasn’t exactly dancing with them. But I was ducking and weaving, trying to get close and bring some of their rhythm into my photographs.

You wouldn’t know that from this photograph. At the time, it represented something of an advance in my photography of people. Looking back now, though, I realize just how static it looks. The parade had briefly come to a halt. The big guy’s dour gaze was telling me I should get the f--- out of the way. But instead I stepped up closer and captured the moment rather than hesitating. In the end, his frown is a great contrast to the guys standing behind him. They want to play. But he’s all about standing his ground.

Just Saying

Made in Sweatshops, 2012

You’ve got to give New Yorkers credit. They’re not shrinking violets when it comes to expressing themselves, whether it’s yelling at referees and players from the stands at a baseball game, cursing at pokey drivers on Sixth Avenue or making political statements at…well, anywhere.

You might have heard about the recent brouhaha at the Park Slope Food Co-op over in Brooklyn. The Co-op ran afoul of some of its members when among its hundreds, maybe thousands, of items stocked were discovered six products made in Israel. Well, you just can’t have that if you’re going to show respect to Palestinians, can you? Or at least that was the line of thinking among Co-op members recommending a boycott of Israeli products (all six of them).

After weeks of crusading by boycott advocates and increasingly embarrassing media attention, including a visit from The Colbert Report’s Samantha Bee—you don’t have to work too hard to imagine how that one turned out—some two thousand Co-op members showed up at a meeting to vote on whether the Co-op should boycott Israeli products, or not. According to the New York magazine account:

“By the time the vote was taken, the Beastie Boys had been quoted twice — co-op members were asked to fight for their right to party — a midwife, citing her experience delivering both pro- and anti-boycott babies, had implored everyone to play nice, and a woman pleaded for peace: "Please, make it stop!" she said. Dayenu!”

Co-op members eventually voted overwhelmingly against the boycott. Since then everyone has presumably gone back to scooping free trade coffee, bulgar wheat and tofu from big bins into environmentally friendly NPR canvas totes.

I didn’t have to witness any of the Park Slope Food Co-op craziness. My daughter used to work on the same street at the Co-op and lived just a few blocks away. But for the last year she’s lived in another neighborhood where the biggest challenge is figuring out what’s in food packages with Polish labels that don’t have pictures on them.

But that doesn’t mean walking around her neighborhood is without its own consciousness-raising reminders.

 

Stop the 1%, 2012

 

 Avoid Occupy, Buy More Stuff, 2012

Just By Looking Up

Blue Tile Trim, 2012

Most people take pictures at eye level. This makes sense because that’s how we see things. But there is so much more to see just by adjusting your elevation or even more simply by just moving your eyes.

You can miss a lot by not looking up, especially if you’re in a city. Architects, especially those of the early Twentieth Century, gave a lot of thought to the tops of their buildings. They looked upon them as architectural crowns, finishings that gave importance or class to what was going on inside.

Think about it. What would the Chrysler Building be without its stainless steel terraced arches at its top? I dare say most people couldn’t pick the Chrysler Building out of a lineup without that distinct crown.

Cass Gilbert’s New York Life building would be just a mass of unfocused moderne without its distinctive gold tower on top.

Not every building is so majestic. But in New York it’s hard to walk down most any street without having a variety of ornate cornices, turrets or towers to look at.

One morning not long ago I had a couple of minutes to walk before meeting my client. I didn’t think this particular stretch of Park Avenue South had much to offer. Then I raised my eyes and started noticing how building that didn’t seem interesting at eye level held all sorts of interesting architectural details at their peaks. The morning light was just right for catching some of these details.

 

Classical Steps, 2012

 

Red, 2012

 

Bring Your Own A/C, 2012

 

Arches on Top, 2012

I am not a photographer.

Franklin Street, Greenpoint, 2012

Sometimes it takes a long time to come to the simplest of realizations. In the case of photography, I think I may have finally made one of the most important realizations in my quest to define what it is I’m doing.

This may not sound like a big thing. But it’s big to me.

Photography isn’t my “day job.” But there are links between photography and my day job that bring this realization about.  

So what’s the realization? It’s simple, really. It’s recognizing that although I have perhaps pretentiously thought of myself in artistic terms, what I really am is an explorer, a pattern seeker, an observer of the small elements of a large world.

If there’s one thing that explains me, and also explains why my habits sometimes drive those around me crazy, it’s my curiosity. I like to learn. I like to see new things. I’m curious about things work and relate to each other.

But unlike some explorers, I’m not inclined to take on a single personal style or subject.  Photographing nothing but Fourteenth Century churches or surfers or vintage automobiles would very quickly get very old with me.

Instead, I’d rather explore the opportunities of the natural and built-up worlds as I encounter them. It’s not that I go anywhere terribly exotic. I’m pretty sure, though, that a lot of people have little interest in exploring the back corners of the everyday world I like to look into. So there’s a chance that I might be able to bring back photographs that these other people will find unexpectedly interesting.

Actually, photographer and educator Jeff Curto said this much better in a recent podcast when he observed, “When we make a picture of something, we elevate the importance of that subject merely by the act of paying attention to it with our camera.”

I’m big on what I call “little moments,” elements of the natural or built-up world that have some pattern, color or play of light and dark that call out to me to be amplified. They’re things other people walk right by without noticing, or to which they give, in any event, little conscious attention. Like this building, above, on Franklin Street in Brooklyn, New York. Dozens of people drove or walked past it just while I was preparing to take this picture. I wonder how many noticed the light or the shadows or the way that light and shadows and colors came together to create a story in that brief moment before the clouds moved in and the rain came?

I’m going to keep exploring because there’s no end to these little moments. 

For the Record

The After Cigarette, 2012

For the record, I am not a peeping Tom.

I know. It probably looks like we photographers are forever nosing into other people’s lives. But on this occasion I will take no blame.

I was staying in one of those oh-so-chic New York hotels the other night, the kind of place where they hire people because they’re good looking rather than because they can do the job. I don’t usually stay in places like this. But I did this time, and it was enough to remind me why I don’t usually stay in places like this.

I could mention the rooftop bar and club that was right over my room. No amount of 600 thread count sheets could dampen that. I could have changed rooms, I suppose. But what says Big Apple more than a little thump-thump-thump electronic music? And who doesn’t want a little thump-thump-thump electronic music to lull them to sleep?

It wasn’t the seductive lighting, either, by which I mean there wasn’t enough light to read a newspaper unless you were right under one of the few lamps. There could have been a band of Romanian gypsies living in the closet for all I could see.

It wasn’t even the sink, the stopper for which had been removed because, according to the good-looking desk clerk, “The designer didn’t like the way it looked.” When my expression belied my reaction, he continued, “Well, you have to admit it looks better without it, doesn’t it?”

No, the reason I won’t be going back to this hotel is because I like at least the sensation of some space between me and the other guests. To wit, this picture.

My room has a posted price of just under $500 a night. (I wasn’t paying anywhere near that.) The people staying on the floor right below me must have been paying several times that. They had not only a room, perhaps even one with chairs, good lighting and a stopper in the sink, but also a nicely fitted out terrace with its own a table and chairs, a potted cherry tree and a couple of chaise lounge chairs. It was the latter that were the problem.

When I woke up Friday morning and pulled back the curtains, what I encountered just outside my window was a mostly undressed couple doing—well, I think the kids call it “hooking up”—on one of the chaise lounges. I wasn’t the only one who could see them. But I was unquestionably the closest. It didn’t seem to matter to them.

It was mighty tempting, let me tell you, to whip out the camera and snap off a quick series of Helmut Newtown-like nude photos. Madonna might have even let me make a book of them. But instead I stepped back from the window and took a shower. Taking pictures just seemed creepy.

When I came out of the bathroom, the couple had donned bathrobes and returned to the terrace for a little post-coital smoke and coffee. By then my conscience bothered me not at all.  

On the Promenade Deck

Brooklyn Heights, 2012

An unexpected assignment came up quickly last week that took me to New York. I arrived in Manhattan Thursday evening and went for a walk. It was cold and windy as I walked to Madison Square Park in the hope of getting a Shake Shack burger before they closed. I like to walk by the New York Life Building when I’m down that way because it’s such a majestic bit of Early Twentieth Century corporate architecture.

I’d also wanted to take a look at the condo building known as One Madison Park, a most interesting 50-story glass and steel structure that from one perspective looks like nothing so much as one of those vertical CD racks that were once popular. One Madison Park was conceived with great ambitions, but fell on bad times and remains nearly empty. Still, it’s an interesting building, worth seeing if you’re in the neighborhood.

What’s relevant to this story is that as I walked down Madison I happened to look up and see the opportunity for a really unexpected picture of the New York Life building as reflected in the glass façade of One Madison Park.

The only problem is that I only had a wide lens on the camera and that wouldn’t do the shot justice. It was also so windy that I really should have used a tripod. (Yes, that’s me admitting I should have used a tripod.) So I grabbed what I could with the wide lens and though I’m not proud of it, it at least gives you an idea of the opportunity that awaits if I come better prepared next time.

 

Met Life in One Madison Park, 2012

Over the next two days, I took about a hundred pictures. Some were quickly discarded. A few are worth keeping. Like the picture at the top of this post.

I’d always wanted to explore Brooklyn Heights. The draw is the famous Promenade that hovers over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and has the arguably best view of lower Manhattan. On Saturday morning I cajoled by patient daughter into going to Brooklyn Heights with me. I wanted to walk the Promenade. I wanted to wander the streets and inspect their hundreds of Colonial-era houses.

It was a lousy cold and wet day. It was misty when we got there and the rain kicked in while I parked the car. But as I looked down Pierrepont Street toward the East River, I got a glimpse of that iconic view of Manhattan. In the distance the dull orange of a Staten Island Ferry provided a great contrast to the otherwise gray scene.

I jumped out of the car and snapped a few shots before the rain started in earnest. The one you see above is the best of that group, and at least so far my favorite of the whole trip. I must go back there on a nicer day.