Three Studies on a Lamppost

Providence 21, 2010

This is our friend Christine’s favorite lamppost. It stands in front of an old armory at the corner of Benefit and Meeting streets on Providence’s College Hill. With the cement-clad armory as a neutral background, the lamppost has a classic look that could as easily place it in foggy London or Paris or Prague. A child might look at it and imagine Mary Poppins and her umbrella swooping up into the air from the draft blowing up Meeting Street. I imagined Sinatra leaning against it on a limbo set, crooning about a lost love.

Photography instructors will tell you it’s good to give yourself a challenge. While Christine was shooting other things nearby, I decided to see how many different shots I could make of this lamppost.

The expected thing is to take a picture of the lamppost. Like this:

Providence 18, 2010

Not much, eh? It needs something. So I stepped back to get a different vantage point, which on College Hill means that you either step up or down a hill. I chose to step up the hill slightly and caught the lamppost, part of the profile of the armory and, to the left, part of what I believe is the steeple of the nearby First Baptist Church. That’s the photo at the top of this post. I like it better than the first one. But it still lacks a story.

I walked around some more and took other pictures of the lamppost. I threw most of those pictures away because they just didn’t do anything for me.

Then, just as I thought I might have exhausted this little exercise, I heard someone coming down the sidewalk. From time to time clusters of students walked down this street, the sound of their voices muffled by the fog, and barely paying attention to the two photographers. But this was just one person. I moved back closer to the armory just in time to photograph the young man as he walked by the lamppost.

I ended up liking this picture the most because there’s at least the hint of a story in it. Where is the young man going? Or is he going away from something? Why is he alone?

Providence 27, 2010

And just to show that focusing on one thing, like a lamppost, can take your attention away from what might just be a better photo, here’s one I took when I decided to leave the lamppost out altogether.

Benefit Street Amory, 2010

In a Fall River Window

In a Fall River Window, 2010

I had a morning free during my trip to Providence last week, so I decided to drive over to Fall River, about a half hour down the road into Massachusetts. I’ve been driving through Fall River for thirty years, but have never stopped there before for so much as a soft drink or to fill the gas tank.

Fall River’s one of those small, hardscrabble New England cities that peaked in the late 1800s when its mills were running full tilt. Nowadays some of the mills are outlet malls or, failing that, too, someone’s trying to rebirth them as business incubators. They line the highway like giant gray stone shoe boxes, mostly empty and quiet where textile machinery once whirred and thumped.

These days Fall River is a place you mostly drive through on the way to and from somewhere else. City fathers try to draw some of those drivers off the road to see a collection of WWII warships down under the Braga Bridge on the Taunton River. But I suspect the audience for that kind of attraction is dying out. The interstate highway cuts right through the middle of town, a bit of brutal federally planned routing I’ve seen once before in Richmond, Virginia, and which you couldn’t get away with any more because it so destroys the lifeblood of the urban neighborhoods it displaces. It’s said the path of the highway runs right over the site of the old Fall River city hall. Perhaps that’s why city fathers were able to cajole the feds into funding a modernistic city hall built atop the interstate highway, creating a similarly brutalist gateway to Southeast Massachusetts.

Something like half of the people in Fall River identify with Portuguese heritage. It’s said to be the hub of a regional population of Portuguese descendants numbering upwards of two million. You see a lot of cars with decals touting the Azores.

I’m sure there must be others. But for most people, Fall River’s most famous resident was axe murderer Lizzie Borden. There’s even a Lizzie Borden B&B Museum , my kind of place to visit if I’d only been there later in the day when it was open.

Triple Decker, 2010

I was there early in the morning. Women and old men took their walks in Kennedy Park, speaking dialects I didn’t understand. Children held their father’s hands as they walked to school. I’m not sure where the fathers work. Unemployment is high hereabouts.

I was drawn first to a corner of the park where two worn out basketball backboards framed a nearly completed nuclear power plant just across the river. Afterwards I parked the car and walked around the neighborhood, cautious of peeking too closely into the lives of residents since I was so obviously an outsider.

Clean Energy on the Way, 2010

I came across the shuttered St. Louis Parish School, built in 1905 and abandoned long enough for most of its windows to have been broken. The picture at the top, In a Fall River Window, was taken from the street next to the school.

On this particular morning I was neatly cleaned and casually dressed. But the rental car I was driving looked every bit like an unmarked police car. I’ve come to believe it’s pretty thoughtless to take pictures in an economically depressed area without taking the time to get to know and become familiar to residents. I didn’t have that kind of time, and could tell that the combination of the car and a stranger (me) with a camera was making people I encountered uncomfortable. So I thought it best to move on.

Braga Bridge, 2010

Killer Diller

Granoff Center, Brown University, 2010

Regular readers will know that I like to look at buildings. If I’m going somewhere that has a new and interesting building I’ve read about, or even an old and interesting building, I’ll look it up. Sometimes I just stumble upon them by mistake.

When I was in Providence last week, I hadn’t checked to see if there were any new buildings I specifically wanted to see. Downtown Providence, having been hit hard by the decline of manufacturing twenty-five years ago, has been reborn over the last decade with new buildings, a lot of impressive adaptive use of old buildings and a renewed orientation to the water. But for this trip, none of that was calling out to me.

Instead, I turned my attention to an old neighborhood, College Hill, where I should have known that the presence of two such progressive schools as the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University would give me some surprises. Both breathe youth into what could have otherwise evolved into a stuffy old affluent neighborhood. Both are in vanguard of independent thinking about design and intellectual exploration. And both are additionally remarkable in the way they do this against a backdrop of historic architecture.

RISD is especially noteworthy for its adaptive use of existing buildings in a historic neighborhood. Brown, from my cursory inspection, seems to have been more about building its own buildings, but always within an arguably academic style not too jarring to its neighbors. Picture lots of ivy-covered brick.

So you can imagine my amazement when I walked around a corner onto Angell Street and came upon the partially completed Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts at Brown University. It didn’t so much as knock me down as much as momentarily take my breath away.

Amid a backdrop of clapboard houses and Georgian brick academic buildings, the $40 million, eight-level Granoff Center, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is like a rectangular spaceship, all glass and metal and thoroughly futuristic. It packs the kind of jarring and transformative jolt that people who like buildings have come to expect from Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who you may know from their Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, their renovations to the Julliard School and Alice Tully Hall in New York, the High Line elevated park, also in New York, or, for pure blow-your-mind-away whimsy, their Blur Building at the Swiss Expo in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.

Take a look at their Pentagram-designed web site.

Here’s a whole page of images of their work.

Some buildings make you want to go inside them. Some lift your spirits just by looking at them. The Granoff Center did neither for me, though the spaces within look like they’ll be extremely cool for their intended purposes. The glass façade on the entrance side may take on the air of a busy ant farm, a hive of creativity, when the building’s finished and occupied.

When I look at buildings like this, I always wonder if they will have lasting power. Are they just the fashion of the moment? Do they move us along in some way? Will they be as thrilling in 25 years as they are today? The Hughes Library at Norfolk’s Old Dominion University, designed by the late Edward Durell Stone, was hailed as a foresighted example of energy-wise design and construction when it was built in 1959. (Did you even know anyone was concerned about energy use in 1959?) But fifty years later, Stone’s designs have fallen way out of fashion. You’d be hard pressed to find anything from Stone’s Hughes Library design behind the rechristened Hughes Hall’s new façade and entirely repurposed interior.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Granoff Center - 138, 2010

Granoff Center 140, 2010

Virtual Friends are Some of the Best Friends I Have

Christine 11, 2010

The online world has been a real godsend for some of us. I know people who only came alive when the Internet made it possible for them to find the only other person in the world who thinks like them. Sure, they had friends before. But from the standpoint of shared interests, geographically local connections were sometimes few and the potential for social isolation was high.

My friend Wally Torta, for example, had no one but the servants in his luxurious harbor view penthouse to talk to before the world wide Interweb made it possible for his art and humor to be enjoyed by a wider audience of people. (He won’t say how many, but assures me it’s now more than seventeen people.)

When Fotolog and Flickr came along, connections started to be made. Those of us pursuing photography in obscurity got to know other people who were pursuing photography in obscurity. Over time, we formed informal networks of friends. At the outset, virtual communities like this are often formed around shared interests, e.g. people who like pictures of dogs or lighthouses or whatever. Over time, though, the knowledge derived expands. When you look a person’s pictures every day for a few years you start to know more about the person behind the camera. You can tell when they're up and when they're down.

That’s as far as some people wish to take it. But for others of us these virtual communities of like-minded souls have become lifelines. The nice thing about digital social media, in either case, is that you can turn the friendship volume up or down, depending on your comfort level.

The first time I met someone from Fotolog in person, we agreed to meet at a coffee shop in Brooklyn. I didn’t expect it to be an uncomfortable meeting. After all, the person I was meeting was someone whose pictures told me enough to feel confident that I wasn’t meeting a creep. Still, I asked my daughter, who showed me how to get to the meeting place, to hang around in case I needed an excuse to get out.

Looking back, that was pretty silly. That first meeting was a great success and was the first in a long string of “real space” meetings with people around the country I’ve met through the Fotolog and Flickr communities. A nicer bunch you couldn't find.

In 2007, I was in Providence, Rhode Island, for business and was able to meet Christine. Some of you may know her as “CA” from Flickr. We had a wonderful lunch, after which she gave me a quick tour of her favorite parts of town.

Business took me back to Providence again earlier this week. This time Christine introduced me to a great French restaurant. The night was foggy. A little rain fell here and there. After dinner, most people would have said their farewells and gone home. But being dedicated Flickr-ers who have never seen a foggy night we didn’t like, Christine and I instead went on a photo ramble along Benefit Street on Providence’s historic College Hill.

Two photographers taking pictures in the same place will invariably be drawn to different things and wander off in different directions. But we made sure to start with pictures of each other taken in the light of Christine’s favorite lamppost. I like this picture of her there because it’s captures the spirit of a friend who’s always looking up.

Christine 3, 2010

Are The "Trocks" in Town?

Are Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo in Town? 2010

Couldn’t resist this.

While walking on the Virginia Beach boardwalk the other day just after the annual Neptune Festival Grand Parade, a flock of grown men and boys in duck costumes cut across the boardwalk to get to the beach, where I presume they were going to splash around in the water like ducks do. I don’t know what group they represented. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Ducks Unlimited. (There wasn't enough camouflage.)

They were funny looking and everyone got a kick out of them. But I couldn’t look at them without recalling Les Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo, a group of serious male dancers who perform, as London’s Sadler’s Well Theater put it, “a unique brand of ballet, dancing a fine line between high art and high camp.”

Look at this short clip of the “Trocks,” as they’re called by their fans, performing a bit of Swan Lake.

I don’t know much about dance. I admire the beauty and athleticism of some of it. But I’m pretty clueless about a lot of it. I am, though, big on musical parodies. Put me in a room with a stack of P.D.Q. Bach records, for example, and I’ll be no good for the rest of the day.

The Trocks aren’t as over the top as P.D.Q. Bach, whose zaniness is ultimately a high-class form of music education. But I suspect that if I had more time to go explore the Trocks on YouTube I could become hooked in their antics and probably gain a much better understanding of dance along the way.

Here’s some more of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo for your viewing pleasure.

Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Not a Christian Group, I’m Guessing, 2010

A few last thoughts about Saturday’s walk at the Neptune Festival.

Usually when I go to the festivals and art shows held on the Boardwalk at Virginia Beach I try to focus on something about the place or the event itself. But lately I’ve been drawn more and more to the people who come to these events. This is a big step for me because I’ve traditionally taken pictures that didn’t have people in them, or that didn’t, in any event, show people big enough to be picked out and recognized.

At the Neptune Festival Art Show, though, I have to admit that the people walking along the Boardwalk were far more interesting than most of the art. Some people were downright unusual looking or just distinctly interesting enough to draw my attention.

About halfway through my walk, I turned around to find my friend the illustrator Walt Taylor also weaving his way through the Neptune Festival crowd. If you’re a fan of Walt’s work, you know that he’s a master of the drawn line and a keen observer of mankind. We both marveled at the diversity of people walking along the Boardwalk and expressed interest in documenting them in some way.

But we also both came to the conclusion that our first inclinations were to ridicule the unusual body shapes, facial expressions, styles of dress and manners of speaking we observed. These were not—how can I say this gently? —your usual patrons of the arts. I don’t remember who said it first, but we commented that there were so many unusual looking people around us that to make fun of them was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Maybe Extra Extra, 2010

We felt guilty for thinking such thoughts; we’re both somewhat shy and fundamentally kind about how we portray strangers. But that guilt lasted about twenty seconds and before you knew it we were taking pictures of anything and anyone.

Here’s Walt’s take on the day. And here.

And a few more of my takes.

Beads, 2010

Young’un Accessory, 2010

Stretch Marks, 2010

Shooting from the Chest

Boardwalkers, 2010

When you’re walking in a crowd and you want to take pictures of people without draw such attention to yourself as will cause people to change what they’re doing, it’s helpful to have a few tricks up your sleeve.

Some photographers resort to long lenses in such situations. They’ll sit way off to the side and cherry pick shots of people without being noticed. I can understand why they might do this. But I’m one of those people who believes you need to get a little closer, even to the point of interacting with the subject. Besides, long lenses flatten the perspective. When you’re dealing with people it can look as if you were just phoning in the picture from another planet. I prefer pictures that make you feel like you were in the crowd.

Neptune Festival Crowd, 2010

Last Saturday I was back down on the Virginia Beach boardwalk getting in a walk and watching some of the festivities of the Neptune Festival, an annual event conceived thirty-seven years ago to bolster the tourism “shoulder season.” The first Neptune Festival was mainly a big weekend seafood party. These days it includes several weeks of parties, balls, 5k and 10k foot races, a parade, art show, bands, sailing regatta, sandcastle building competition and probably some other things I’m forgetting.

Channeling my inner Martin Parr, I decided before I left home that I wanted to get close to the crowd. I loaded the 18-35mm wide-angle lens on my camera and headed into the fray. This used to be my default lens because I like to see “wide.” But now I use it mostly for the slightly distorted perspective it gives, especially in low angle shots.

Normally, I’m obsessive about looking into the viewfinder to compose pictures. But for this outing I had to let that go. What I did whenever I saw someone walking towards me that I wanted to photography I lifted my camera to the middle of my chest and took a picture without ever looking into the viewfinder. As these pictures show, if you do that people don’t even look at the cameras.

The downside of this technique, of course, is that composition can be hit or miss. Some of the shots I took this way completely missed the subject. Some, like Fame, Like a Good Figure, is Fleeting, have focus issues. The man in Portrait of an Unknown could have been better positioned. Clearly, I’ve got some work to do perfecting this technique. But if I practice it some more I’m pretty sure I’ll get better at it.

Fame, Like a Good Figure, is Fleeting, 2010

Portrait of an Unknown, 2010