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2010-04-16T15:14:00.001-07:00

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Checking in on the skyline of Lower Manhattan

2010-04-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

With the reconstruction and redevelopment of the World Trade Center site well under way (lots more on that later), I think it's important to take a look at another skyscraper going up downtown. I've become fascinated by one in particular that I don't seem to read much about in the news. But I've kept my eye on it every single day over the past 10 or so months, since I moved to the southeast edge of Chinatown. I'm talking about Frank Gehry's Beekman Tower, aka The Beekman. At 867 feet (76 stories), the building is the 8th tallest building in New York City (the WTC, including spire, will be nearly twice that at 1,776 feet). To be in the Top 10 in New York City is a big deal. To say it's the 29th tallest building in the USA sounds less impressive. But if the Beekman was going up in Los Angeles it would be the 2nd tallest building there (in Chicago, it would rank 9th). But I digress. My point is that the building is somewhat of a monstrosity, a "skyline-shaper" if you will. Especially from where I view it every day, looking down Madison Street from Market. It just seems to lord over everything else around it. It's really the first building that I instinctively check out to determine atmospheric haze, air quality, even height and density of low-hanging clouds if it's raining.The building has been topped out for several months now and will soon be completely wrapped in its unique wavy/curvy exterior facade. I'm by no means an architectural expert, but I have to think that this building cannot have been designed without some sort of "WTC-as-backdrop" consideration. In other words, to me at least, it seems to have been designed with the idea that it will stand as a "lead-in" to the WTC (especially when viewed from the east, with the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground). A lot of people, including myself, have bemoaned the fact that we don't have a rebuilt or even topped-out WTC yet. But nobody can argue that we've finally reached the decade in which we've started to see the new Lower Manhattan emerge.

Charles W. Cushman

2009-12-24T12:17:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered a photographer whose work has made an indelible impression on me. I am talking about Charles Cushman, a talented amateur photographer whose 14,500 Kodachrome pictures (or three cubic feet) from the late 1930s through the late 60s are held at the Indiana University Archives. As part of the University's Digital Library Program, the Cushman Archive has been digitized and organized into a keyword-searchable database and can be found in its entirety here. While I've only viewed about a third of the entire archive, I'm pretty sure there isn't much I can add to what's already been written about the man and his work. Here's one line from the project's descriptive text that I feel really nails what the work is all about: "The Charles Cushman collection mirrors the tradition of significant amateur or modest commercial photographers who contribute to the canon of serious photography." I recommend you read Rich Remberg's analysis of Cushman's work in the context of other documentary photographers, and Eric Sandweiss' account of the growth of urban America, as seen through Cushman's Contax. Speaking of his Contax, you can view his equipment here. (Above: "Oct. 6, 1942, The Angelo's Bakery, 58 Mulberry St., early morning." Image number P02700)"

Born in 1896 in Poseyville, Indiana, Cushman enrolled at Indiana University in 1914 and graduated in 1917. The following year he enlisted in the United States Navy Auxiliary Reserve Force, which put him in Chicago. In 1924 he married Elsa Jean Hamilton, who was a first cousin of John Steinbeck. Cushman held various jobs over the next couple decades. Very little is known about his career after 1944, when he worked at the War Department (a precursor of the Department of Defense). It was said that Cushman enjoyed attending the opera and the theater, and presenting shows of his slide collection. After moving to San Francisco sometime in the 1950s he would enjoy having a five o'clock drink while overlooking the ocean. Cushman died in 1972. (Right: "May 22, 1964, Salzburg, Austria." Image number P13231)

Since the Cushman archive was posted on the web in late 2003, the work has spread around somewhat and a bit has been written about him. I discovered Cushman's pictures on Flickr while researching something else. The first ones I came across were taken in New York City, mostly in the Financial District and the Lower East Side. But it didn't take long to discover that Cushman had photographed all over the world. For the purposes of this entry I simply want to post imagery from New York. (Below: "October 4, 1942, Lower East Side, crowd gathers in front of Red Cross station during salvage collection." Image number P02680)
There is just a ton of material on the site, including his notebooks in which he recorded not only location and date of photographs, but shutter speed and aperture for each and every frame exposed. More from the explanatory text: "The earliest photographs in the collection consist of approximately 1,400 black-and-white photographs that Mr. Cushman stored in albums. However, the most startling and significant aspect of his work relates to the photographs he began shooting in 1938, two years after the introduction of Kodachrome. Between 1938 and 1969 Mr. Cushman shot nearly 18,000 Kodachrome slides, documenting his travels throughout the United States and Mexico and, to some extent, countries in the Middle East and Europe. His legacy is a remarkable photographic document of American social history in the twentieth century. Where other works of this nature and caliber each focus on one community during a narrow period, Charles Cushman's slides cover thirty years, in color, including a time when most photographers were working in black and white. Although the black and white photographs are of high quality, the most significant portion of the collection is the color slides, due to the size of the collection, the rarity of early color, and the urgency to preserve these images." (Below: "Oct. 7, 1942, Chinese store windows, New York." Image number P02708)
A friend asked me recently about my influences in photography. I replied, with Cushman squarely in mind, "More and more, it's the people nobody has ever heard of. I love coming across lesser-known photographers who worked more or less anonymously, for the simple joy of photography." I love it when I can look at a photographer's work and not sense any "ego" involved; humble and evidentiary photography with no gimmicks or reliance upon technical trickery. In this sense, Cushman reminds me of photographers Robert Otter, Fred Herzog, and the more recently discovered Vivian Maier, just to name a few. Another photographer who is definitely more well known than these, but yet remains still somewhat obscure, is William Gedney. In fact, the way this Cushman archive is set up reminds me quite a bit of the William Gedney archive at Duke University, (which I featured on my other site several years ago).

Another conversation I had recently with a different friend dealt with our own evolving tastes in terms of what we find ourselves photographing. For me, it used to be all about people, crazy characters in particular (and still is to some degree). But now I find myself making a lot more of an effort to just photograph The City: straightforward shots of the skyline, perhaps certain intersections that have a good energy, etc. I've written about Bowery and First quite a bit. Ten years ago it used to be a muddy lot used for parking by rental van companies. It was also a satellite drop-off location where you could ditch your U-Haul, as I did, after making my one-way drive to NYC in 2000. Here is the corner of that intersection (Below: "Oct. 4, 1942, S.E. corner of 1st St. and the Bowery." Image number P02697)
Perhaps it's because this summer I moved to a new neighborhood that is a lot closer to the Financial District and I just sense the pull of downtown a lot more than I used to. Therefore I find myself photographing the changing Lower Manhattan skyline in a much more straightforward manner. Making the skyline the subject instead of just the backdrop. I began sensing this change in my approach right around the same time I discovered Cushman's work. Here is another example of what I'm talking about. Again–simple, straightforward shots of locations, the kind of pictures Cushman made regularly, and I thank him for it. (Below: "Sept. 27, 1941, The old Fulton Market, Manhattan's Lower East Side." Image number P02516)
But I would be remiss if I didn't link to several other shots in Cushman's archive (all links open in new windows, as usual). One evening I spent a couple of hours clicking through his work. At times I laughed out loud, especially when comparing this image to this image. I have taken a lot away from his pictures, especially his San Francisco images. He even got a little bit of the Haight-Ashbury scene. This one caught my eye. Some are straight forward and show only streets, traffic, architecture. Some got a little more into how a street photographer shoots (in some cases even catching some flak for it).

And we can't forget about Chicago, where Cushman called home for many years. A very different Chicago than the one I'm used to (check out this ghostly image of the skyline). Here are some guys fixing an "old" Cadillac. Many are found moments, like this military medical student posing his fiancé on a tree for a snapshot in front of a lake. For some reason I forget that it's color pictures I'm looking at, until I see shots like this girl in a bathing suit. There's this oddity from a Gay Nineties parade. And you must check out this great shot of two young kids looking out their window, part of Cushman's series from Chicago's South Side that looks nothing like this today.

There's some great stuff from Austria including this bus stop scene and this (scanning mishap?) and this incredible balloon situation and this one that has a very timeless appeal. Clearly Cushman was a lover of architecture. Sometimes I felt as if I was seeing him come back to recurring themes, the same shot here and here.

I could go on and on linking to pictures of his, but more than anything I'm just thankful for Cushman's "egoless" approach to photography. It seems his style is only that he has none. I can envision him standing in any given location writing in his notebook, recording street names, camera settings, etc. His work only confirms what I find more and more to be my own guiding M.O. in photography. And that is not to depend so much on my own "cleverness" or "wit" to make a picture, but rather to just find a quiet and steady, disciplined patience that trusts and finds reassurance in a society's perpetual need to look back at itself and its cities, in photographs. (Below: "Sep. 27, 1941, Lower Manhattan from Jersey City ferry boat Lower Hudson, with Manhattan's skyscrapers." Image number P02513)
All images copyright Charles Cushman Collection, Indiana University Archives. With special thanks to Bradley Cook, Curator of Photographs, Office of University Archives and Records Management.

A Question for Charles Gatewood

2009-09-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

This is a triptych of images, all taken in front of the New York County Supreme Court building at 60 Centre Street in Lower Manahttan. On the left is the original, a fairly well-known Henri Cartier-Bresson picture from 1947. In the center is an image taken some 30 years later by the photographer Charles Gatewood. Gatewood's image appears in his 1984 limited-edition book titled "Wall Street," which I bought in 1998 or so. Look at how the pillars line up in both images, and in particular the gaps in between the pillars. Although Gatewood is shooting with a wider lens, he is clearly standing in the same exact spot as HCB. My question for Gatewood is, was this intentional or purely coincidental? An homage or entirely happenstance? I noticed this early 2001 and within a few days had my own version of the scene from nearly the same spot (far right).

"Always New York" group show at Lunasa

2009-09-04T08:02:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce I'm participating in a group show at Lunasa, 126 First Avenue, starting this coming Tuesday, September 8th. The opening is from 6-9, so stop on by. It's an all black and white show, so I'm anxious to see what everybody hangs. The show, which is presented by the Lunasa Photo Series, is being curated by Bryan Formhals, who is the driving force behind La Pura Vida Gallery. Looking forward to meeting all the other photographers.

Two Bridges

2009-07-31T14:55:00.000-07:00

It wasn't until about two months ago that I first heard of the neighborhood known as "Two Bridges." Well, I knew of the neighborhood, I just never knew it went by that name. It was early June and Yvonne and I had just looked at an apartment there that we really liked. That night as I was checking out the neighborhood on Google Maps I was surprised to see the neighborhood labeled as such.

I'm happy to report that we ended up taking the apartment. And so at the end of June, as the world was glued to the Michael Jackson story, we were in the thick of our move. But all throughout July we still had access to our old apartment (on Allen at Delancey), so there were of course a few odds and ends that I put off moving until a few days ago (processing equipment and other random stuff). It wasn't until yesterday that I dropped off the keys to the old place. So it's "Goodbye, 285 square feet of gridlocked traffic and carhorns at Allen and Delancey" and "Hello, 510 square feet of subway cars rumbling crossing the Manhattan Bridge." (Trust me, I'll take the latter any day).But back back to the neighborhood. It's always interesting when somebody asks where we live. To people I've just met, I say "Lower East Side." If they ask where, I say, "Way down, it's Chinatown near the Manhattan Bridge." Telling people that we live at Market and Madison rarely offers any help, but if I say "It's near the East Broadway F train" people instantly get it. A couple times people have clung to the words "Under the Manhattan Bridge" and said "Wait, you moved to DUMBO?" I've already started telling people, "Okay, so next time you are flipping the channels at night and see David Letterman doing his opening monologue, look at the miniature skyline behind him. That's our neighborhood, Two Bridges."What's really cool is that a 15-minute walk puts us squarely into the South Street Seaport and Financial District. That same walking time starting at our old place would have gotten us to Tompkins Square Park or Astor Place. So even though we're still in the same general vicinity as far as Manhattan is concerned, being further downtown and a lot closer to the waterline gives the place a very different vibe.

In a retail sense, the neighborhood is largely unchanged over the past however-many years. There are a lot of printing businesses and other light industrial shops, a ton of inexpensive Chinese restaurants with bare florescent lighting, mom and pop laundromats, etc. There are absolutely no bars or high-end clothing boutiques, and only an occasional internet cafe. I haven't heard any clever new real estate acronyms yet. It's the southern edge of Chinatown so I wouldn't be surprised to see something with "SOCHI" in it. We're truly in the DUMBO of Manhattan, but I'm pretty sure we'll never see it called "DUMBOOM." Just playing around in this vein, I also came up with "B-BAMB" for Between Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, which inevitably lead to the dreaded "BAMBI" for Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges Interchange. (Here's a shot from the Manhattan Bridge looking west toward the Financial District. Our rooftop is not visible from this angle because it's a short building, but it's directly down beyond where those two white plastic coat hangers are dangling).
On a more photography-related note, I wonder how any of this might affect my picture taking. I can definitely feel the lure of Lower Manhattan, and the World Trade Center site looms large, a mere 20-minute walk from our front door. I suspect once One World Trade Center eventually is topped out we'll be within its long wintertime shadow. But I have to say, it's all about the bridges down here. Just living within 100 feet of the Manhattan Bridge has its own unique gravitational pull. I've been comparing the bridges a lot lately. I wrote a Twitter update a few weeks ago: "Contrasting three NYC bridges: Brooklyn = gothic stone cathedral. Williamsburg = rugged Sherman tank. Manhattan = elegant ocean liner." The Manhattan Bridge is the youngest of these three, and in fact (you read it here first) turns 100 this year, on New Year's Eve.

Best Portfolio at FHPW-Marcella Brooks

2009-07-27T08:37:00.000-07:00

Every summer for five days in July it is my great honor and privilege to work with high school students at the Flint Hills Publications Workshop in Manhattan, Kansas. I just finished my 12th year teaching photography at this workshop. Usually we have about 25 kids enroll in the class, but this year we had about half that. I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Marcella Brooks of Kapaun Mount Carmel High School in Wichita for winning the annual "Best Portfolio" award at the workshop. I've selected two images of hers to post here, the first of which (top) was the very first image I saw from anybody at the entire workshop. The picture has a simplicity to it that I find very appealing. It ran lead on the center spread double truck in the workshop's newspaper, The Kedzie Krier. For another picture, taken at the all-workshop dance, she used the DJ's strobe lights to take the relatively mundane setting of a Holiday Inn banquet room and make it look like some ultra-chic nightclub.

Marcella will be the photo editor for her yearbook this coming fall and I wish her the best. I sent her an email asking for a little back story on how she got into photography: "My photography story isn't particularly inspiring but it really started with some of my dad's old yearbooks that I came across while cleaning my attic a couple of years back. Every single picture was filled with colorful expressions that made you forget that the picture was taken in black and white. The photographer had captured all these great moments that otherwise would have been forgotten. From that moment on, I wanted to be the person to take those pictures that immortalize everyone's high school years."

Eye on the Strand

2009-07-14T20:12:00.000-07:00

Last November I entered some photographs in the "Eye on the Strand" photography contest. The contest was a call for submissions from anybody with interesting, creative pictures taken inside or outside of the Strand bookstore. I entered on somewhat of a whim, but to make a long story short my picture of a woman carrying an upside-down baby outside Strand won second place in the contest. Co-sponsors of the contest were the Aperture Foundation and Pratt Institute, so along with a collection of over 50 photography books I will receive from Aperture I also get to enroll in a photography or computer class at Pratt this fall. Not bad for uploading a few jpegs! So if you're in New York in next few weeks I hope you will stop by the Pratt Institute Center for Continuing and Professional Studies Gallery on 14th Street in Manhattan to check out the exhibition. The opening is tonight, July 15th, from 6pm to 8pm. All are invited.

details:
Eye on the Strand
July 15 to August 26th
Pratt Institute CCPS Gallery
144 West 14th Street, 2nd Floor
(The gallery is open weekdays from 10am until 8pm; Saturdays 10am until 4pm)

Thoughts on LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph

2009-06-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a weekend spent down in Charlottesville, Virginia at the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph. It was my first time attending, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The festival, or just plain "Look" as it's known, is billed as "three days of love, peace and photography." I definitely think that description fits in with the festival's origins, which everybody knows is the legendary backyard slide projections hosted by National Geographic photographer Michael "Nick" Nichols. That small gathering has evolved into a full-fledged photography festival featuring the work of dozens of photographers in various exhibitions and nightly projections. The "3" in LOOK3 does not refer to this being a three-day festival, or even that it is in its third year. It refers to the fact that there are three "legacy artists" that are honored each year. The first year, 2007, featured Eugene Richards, William Albert Allard and Sally Mann. Last year it was Joel-Peter Witkin, Mary Ellen Mark and James Nachtwey. This year it was Sylvia Plachy, Martin Parr and Gilles Peress. Sadly, Look is taking next year off, the goal being to return in 2011 bigger and better than ever and with more funding. You can get the backstory on that here. I definitely hope to return in 2011.

It was very hard for me not to compare Look to Visa pour l'Image, which is a photojournalism festival I attended last year in Perpignan, France. Both festivals revolve around the centrally located area of their respective pedestrian/historic districts, with various exhibitions in dynamic venues and nightly amphitheater-style projections. Here are some thoughts:

--I went into Look knowing a LOT more people. I showed up at Visa solo, a total stranger. So for me, Look felt a lot more like a reunion with old photographer friends. Look definitely reminded me of one of the NPPA Flying Short Course events I attended in college and when working at my first newspaper job in the late 90s. At Visa, initiating conversation with folks was a lot of work. For me, Visa was just as much about sightseeing and being a tourist as it was about seeing great photography.

--For Visa, think "Castle near the River." Look is simply, "Main Street Pedestrian Mall." One is not better than the other, I'm simply listing this early on sort of give you a visual since I don't have any pics to post. Look was all centrally located, everything within a couple hundred yards. Visa was also centrally located but spread out more and required a bit more walking.

--I think it takes a while to get the feel of a festival. Both at Visa and Look, a big part of my experience was just getting to know the lay of the land. I really had to soak it in for a few days, I'm only just now able to sit down and reflect. There's no way I would have wanted to blog from either place. That being said, I could go back now to either place and know exactly where I'd have my first meal, where I'd stay, etc.

--In general, I was more impressed with the exhibitions at Look than at Visa. The exhibitions at Look were all pretty bold, I thought. Each one was totally different from the others. Many of them felt more like photographic installations than traditional photography exhibitions. Plachy's show, "Waiting," felt like it was in the art classroom of an old school. Parr's show, "Luxury," was in a high-end boutique showroom; Peress's show, "Natures Mortes," felt like it was inside a basement morgue. Nachtwey had a show about tuberculosis that was strewn with mosquito nets. I probably spent the most time at the World Press Photo winners exhibit, which was laid out very nicely. For the most part, the exhibitions at Look were roomier and airier whereas at Visa it felt very crowded, like hordes of people milling around looking at work in a museum. Even though the cafe/street scenery and narrow streets of Perpignan are charming, I still think Look's exhibitions were all a lot more up my alley.

--Conversely, I felt the nightly projections of Look came in distant second to those of Visa. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the Look projections. The work was good but I just think the projections lacked the technical sophistication of Visa's. At Look, there was a guy at a computer in the back and sometimes his mouse and finder windows would show up on the main projection screen by accident. Again, very enjoyable but noticeably less professional than Visa. Visa's projections featured overlaying images and montages, graphics, etc. with much, much more fluid sequencing and music, dissolves, fades, triptychs, visual effects, typography, etc. I have no doubt that when Look has been around for 20 years like Visa has, they'll have it more than perfected by then.

--One of the first big media companies that I think of when I think of Look is National Geographic. When I think of Visa I think of Getty Images. In general, I got a sense Look is more about celebrating the art and craft of photography, both documentary and fine art, and everything had somewhat of a folksy vibe. Visa is a lot more scorched-earth, hardcore photojournalism and photographers who've seen horrific deeds. Look I would compare to the romance of beautiful color slides projected through an old clackety projector; Visa is more like editing color negs on a light table.

--At both festivals, after I had looked at all the exhibitions, I found myself sort of wandering aimlessly in between events, talks, etc. This is why I wish there was just a designated area where you could just sit down and share your work and look at the work of others, shoot the breeze, etc. But there was virtually no (public) sharing of work that I saw at Look, and only a tad more at Visa.

--As for the Insight Conversations with Plachy, Parr and Peress, I would have to say Peress was my favorite. Well, first of all I should say that I unfortunately missed most of Plachy's, as I arrived in Charlottesville late, just as she was starting her talk (I had to leave in order to make the check-in where I was staying). Martin Parr's on Friday afternoon was thoroughly enjoyable, a real treat, and easily he got the most laughs. And I would say his exhibit in Charlottesville was my favorite of the entire festival. But there was something about hearing Peress speak, I guess all the things I've always thought that he brings to the table of photojournalism were confirmed. I could write a whole blog post about his talk alone (he was "interviewed" by MaryAnne Golon on stage). There's a passage of his I copied down from the Magnum Stories book a few years ago, his theory on four kinds of photographic authorship: that of the camera and the lens being used, that of the photographer composing the picture and choosing the moment to press the button, that of the viewer of the photograph, and finally that of the force of reality itself. There was one moment when he was talking about when he was younger and how Henri Cartier-Bresson had given him some advice. The room was totally quiet and as he said Bresson's name there was a rumble of thunder outside. Very powerful.

--In the end, I think, it's all about being bombarded with imagery for a weekend or a week, as is the case with Look and Visa, respectively. The intensity of seeing so much work by others really makes me examine what it is that I do, makes me wonder how I stand out from the crowd, if at all. Admittedly, it was a little hard to see other people wearing name tags that said "Artist" on them, whereas mine just said "General." My biggest regret is that I didn't act quick enough in trying to get my work shown in either festival, not that I would have gotten in if I had. But I certainly feel people would respond to what I've done over the past nine years in New York, and I would say it would be undeniably more rewarding to return to either of these festivals with some work being shown or exhibited. Some day. I am going to do some regrouping of my own this summer.

Times Square pedestrian mall opens (Update)

2009-06-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

Before I change the topic away from Times Square I just wanted to add these two scans of the pedestrian mall. I didn't plan to do this before-and-after view, I just discovered I had them today while looking for something else. At any rate, I think this does a slightly better job of showing the changes to Times Square than my cellphone snap from a couple weeks ago.

Times Square pedestrian mall opens

2009-05-26T13:11:00.000-07:00

As far as I'm concerned, Sunday's opening of the Times Square pedestrian mall was a Grand Slam for New York City. We walked up there on Sunday to check it out and liked what we saw. The lawn chairs, people chilaxing, live bands performing, it all had a very airy, festive vibe. I will no longer dread all the overcrowded sidewalks filled with slow tourists walking three and four abreast. Indeed, I look forward to seeing what they do with it, and I hope it remains permanent. Now, if we could just get the High Line opened in the next few weeks.

Washington Square Park Reopens

2009-05-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Fortunately I won't have to publish a blog post that I had been working on about how long the renovation of Washington Square Park has taken. Because as of today the park is finally open again. It's about time. Nobody ever thought it would take this long (18 months). I decided to check out the park today while walking back from an errand and I was stoked to see, all the way from 11th Street, the central fountains spurting water. I think it had probably only been open a few hours by that point. I ran into my press photographer friend Michael Appleton and together with another photographer we were able to get an escort up to the top of the arch. So without further ado, here are a few symmetry-obsessed views of the realigned fountain plus one nice moment of some crusty characters getting a little wet. Welcome back, WSP.

Rooftop Weather

2009-04-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've recently acquired a set of keys for a building nearby in my neighborhood that has a fantastic rooftop. The views of the skyline, of course, are stunning. And it's a big relief not to have to deal with the rooftop of my own building, where a restaurant's fans are constantly spewing out hot and sticky grease-laden exhaust fumes. What's most important is that on this higher and cleaner rooftop I have a much more clear view of the horizon. And now that the nights are starting to get warmer, that's exactly where you'll find me watching the skies. Indeed, I've been continuing the work I began last fall of capturing moonrises and moonsets via time lapse. But this time around I've got the added magnification of a Meade telescope. Coupled with an adaptor for my Canon EOS camera, it's basically like having an 800mm lens fixed at f/11. As the pictures above show, I've been able to capture the moon in all its dramatic glory. A setting Waxing Crescent and a rising Full Moon (all six of the above are either one or the other) are my two favorite moon phases to photograph. They're the easiest to get because they occur right around the same time the sun sets. What I'm hoping to get soon is a shot of a rising Waning Crescent and a setting Full Moon. These two are harder because they require waking up before the sun rises, and I rarely go to bed earlier than 1:30 AM. But there are lots of other cool astronomical events I've got marked on my calendar, and I'm not simply photographing everything through a telescope. I won't get into the details of that stuff right now. But in the spirit of May's arrival, and with a beautiful new perspective on this amazing city, I wanted to share these images. Keep your fingers crossed for some clear skies this spring.

Recap of "Real Art For Real People" event

2009-04-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everybody who showed up on Sunday for the "Real Art For Real People" event hosted by See-NYC. Above is a quick time lapse of the event from start to finish. We had a great time (and even sold a few pieces). I'd especially like to thank Andrew Drossman, who I tracked down just days before the event. Andrew is the man I photographed riding his unicycle during the Blizzard of 2006. It was nice to meet him and his family. Below is a picture of me talking with him. (photo by Abdi Oday)

News Flash

2009-04-02T18:36:00.001-07:00

I will be featured in a small show this coming Sunday, April 5th at 288 Elizabeth Street in Manhattan. I am sharing a space with the Brooklyn-based painter and silkscreen artist Buster Black. The event will run from 3-11 PM. So please stop by if you're around. As a preview for the event, I was interviewed a few weeks ago. The transcript of that Q&A can be read here, on the blog published by the wonderful ladies over at See-NYC.

In other news, I was asked to participate in a fun feature on the blog of Blake Andrews, a photographer based in Eugene, Oregon. It's basically me writing about what I was thinking when I shot certain pictures. Take a look here.

Olympus Pen-F: Recession Camera

2009-03-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

Here it is already halfway through March and I've just now gotten around to posting my February pictures. Part of the delay in getting them posted is because I've been concentrating a lot on time lapse and telescope photography (which I'm just not quite ready to share with the world yet). But the real reason is that I've been rolling with a brand new (used) Olympus Pen-F lately and so I've been burning through about half as much film as I usually do. When shooting with the Pen-F, it takes me longer to get through a single roll. Therefore I have fewer rolls when I do a batch of film. Usually I like to have at least seven to ten rolls of film before I process; the other day I did a batch of five.

If this doesn't make any sense to you, it's probably because you're unaware that the Pen-F is a half-frame camera. So on a normal roll of 35mm film you can get about 72 pictures. On the Pen-F this is achieved by shrinking and rotating the traditional horizontal/landscape format prism system 90 degrees so that when you hold it normally and look through the viewfinder you're automatically composing in a vertical/portrait format. The size of the resulting frame is decreased by about half, so your negative is tiny (18mm x 24mm) and therefore a bit grainier when enlarged to normal sizes. It takes some getting used to, but if you can get your focus sharp and don't need an in-camera meter, working with this smaller format is a delight. Here are just a few quick examples:
What's more, with a 35mm scanner you can scan two pictures at once. I used to really work this "in-camera" diptych aspect a lot more when I had my Kodak 2035 scanner, but for the past few years I've been using a Nikon 5000-ED scanner and they just don't look as good.

If you've never heard of the Pen-F (or FT or FV), it's probably because they were only made for seven years in the 1960s. I first heard about the Pen-F in 2004 from my good friend Andy Cutraro, whose father had found one at a garage sale and gave it to him. Andy brought it to NYC and let me borrow it for a few months, that's what a nice guy he is (he also pointed out this great Cameraquest link about the camera). I soon bought one of my own on eBay, albeit a more cumbersome double stroke model, but that didn't matter because it only cost $100 AND it came with a sweet 40mm f/1.4 lens. I dropped it last fall and dinged up the body pretty good, but was too lazy and broke to see what the repair would cost. My wife got me a new one for Christmas and so I'm treating this one as if it's my last (I've since sold the broken one). With twice the amount of frames on each roll resulting in me shooting about half the amount of film I normally do, it really is the perfect film camera for this recession. In my most recent website update (again, February 2009), all but one of the vertical shots were with the Pen-F. See if you can determine which one wasn't. I'll leave you with some of those diptychs I was talking about, circa 2005:

1996

2009-02-18T09:04:00.000-08:00

Late in my final semester of college I got accepted to the Eddie Adams Workshop (Barnstorm IX, in 1996). It was easily the highlight of my senior year. I was just wrapping up four years at Kansas State University, which had nowhere near the amount of photojournalism students as, say, University of Missouri or Western Kentucky University did. So while K-State had a strong tradition of photography in its Student Publications department, I was relatively isolated from the larger world of photojournalism. So going to the workshop was a real eye-opener for me. Just being around 99 other photographers who were roughly close to my age and experience level was an invaluable experience. Thirteen years later, however, it's not so much my fellow workshop attendees that I think about as much as being able to meet icons like Gordon Parks, Carl Mydans and of course Mr. Adams himself (and many others). I've been digging through my college negs this past week trying to find an image to contribute to the 100th Anniversary edition of K-State's yearbook, the Royal Purple. But I've come across a ton of other pics and this one of the three aforementioned photographers is one I wanted to share.

Eight Years Ago

2009-01-21T10:48:00.001-08:00

Now that Barack Obama's presidency has been underway for over a full 24 hours, I have to be honest and ask myself if I don't truly regret going to DC for the inauguration. By all the accounts from the photographers I've followed, it was definitely a cold and crowded situation and it appears that just getting in and out of The Mall would have been a full day's work. I don't think I would have had the mobility or vantage point that I would've liked, but then again it definitely would have been cool to see what 1.5 million people looks like. At any rate, I'm not too upset by having stayed here (I watched/photographed the event from Times Square), and it was a real treat watching the recaps on television last night on our brand new high-definition TV.

This past summer over the 4th of July I spent four nights in DC, my longest stay ever there. Yesterday and today I've been recalling a lot of experiences from that trip in trying to gather my mental bearings of how DC is layed out, which direction is which, etc. But I've also been thinking a lot about one of my first visits to DC, in January of 2001, for George W. Bush's first inauguration. That was also a widely-attended event, not so much because of the inauguration as much as the protest to the inauguration. I've always said that experience was my first real taste of protest/dissent/activism. I had just moved to NYC five months prior and going to DC to cover the protests felt like a big assignment to me.
I overheard last night on ABC that the DC Police Department hadn't reported a single arrest throughout the day. Surely, I thought, there had to be some sort of protest where people were getting angry. I'm not thinking so much about angry folks protesting Obama's citizenship as much as anarchist types who aren't going to be happy no matter who's in office. Apparently there was one protest regarding Guantanamo Bay, but it was more of a call for Obama to close it. Quite an opposite image from the egg-tossing and angry banners of 2001:

I am pretty optimistic about the next four years. That being said, I really think there's only one direction we can go as a country. To me, this inauguration seems to have the vibe of one big three-weeks-delayed New Year's Resolution. I just hope we can start getting some traction toward solving this economic crisis and withdrawing troops responsibly from Iraq. I'm worried Americans are going to become impatient with Obama. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Hopefully, four years from now, we'll be in a vastly different position and hurtling headlong on a peaceful trajectory into 2013.

Pete Souza

2009-01-16T10:54:00.000-08:00

I'm a little slow in getting around to this topic, but I wanted to take a moment to commend the Obama Administration on the appointment of Pete Souza as Official White House Photographer. I can't think of a better selection for this post. I've had the honor of knowing Souza since the early 90s, when I was a freshman at Kansas State University. Souza was a grad student at K-State in the late 70s and he's remained an active alumnus ever since. In 2001, I volunteered alongside Souza and other former K-State photographers to mentor current K-Staters during an intensive spring break photography workshop in Salina, Kansas. The last time I saw Souza was 2004, when he was in New York photographing the lead up to the Republican National Convention. We met up for a beer and that turned into several beers and afterwards I foolishly convinced him to check out the view of downtown from my rooftop as a lightning storm was underway. The next day I was petrified when I discovered a few people had been killed doing the exact same thing less than a mile away.

My knowledge of Barack Obama is synonymous with the images of Pete Souza. With the title of National Photographer for the Chicago Tribune, Souza photographed Obama's first year in the Senate, including his first Senatorial trip overseas in 2005, to Russia, as well as Obama's historic trip to Africa the following year. And so it was no surprise to see Souza was there in Springfield, Illinois in early 2007, photographing Obama alone backstage as he collected his thoughts moments before announcing his candidacy. I can't wait to see the images Souza gets in the coming days as well as in the next several months, and I wish him the best of luck.

Cosmos

2009-01-08T08:56:00.001-08:00

For Christmas, I got the seven-disk box set of the Carl Sagan television science series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. A few minutes into the first episode, I thought the whole "Spaceship of the Imagination" thing was going to be totally cheesy. But very quickly I became glued to it. Watching five of the 13 hour-long episodes has dovetailed nicely with an another animated stills movie I had been working on throughout December, one that's based entirely on NASA imagery. Since I've already dealt with the moon a lot on this blog, the piece I want to show you focuses mostly on Mars and Saturn. A lot of the images from Mars are from Spirit and Opportunity, the two rovers on the surface of the planet (plus a few images taken by Mars Global Surveyor). And then it's on to Saturn, where the Cassini satellite has been snapping pictures of the ringed planet since its arrival in 2004. The movie comprised of all this awesome NASA imagery can be seen here.

"Cosmos" was created in the late 1970s, which was right as Voyager 1 and 2 were returning data from Jupiter and Saturn. Aside from all the science those two probes have radioed back to Earth, it really makes me ponder the size of the Solar System. I did a quick search to find the speed at which Voyager 1 and 2 are flying through space and found that it's about 10 miles per second. Light, on the other hand, travels at 186,000 miles per second, which is nearly 6 trillion miles per year. I looked up which star way out there is closest to us (the binary star Alpha Centauri, a name I quickly recognized from grade school) and learned that it's 4.37 light years away from the Sun. Now, even though neither Voyager probe is headed directly toward Alpha Centauri, it's utterly mind-boggling to me to realize that it would require over 80,000 years for one of these probes to travel such a distance. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong on the calculation, but is that not just a totally daunting realization?

Portfolio Video

2008-12-15T10:22:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago, over on Rob Haggart's website, I saw some links to a few photographers who had posted movies of their portfolios to the web. I don't own a video camera, so instead I used my 5D and took nearly 600 shots of myself paging through my portfolio. Then I used Quicktime Pro to create an image sequence, which is exactly the same process I use for time lapse. Here's how it turned out: http://caryconover.com/portfolio.mov

Kodachrome

2008-12-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

My friend Mike Hutmacher, photographer at the Wichita Eagle, sent this to me over the weekend. It's a story and audio slide show he did on Dwayne's Photo, a photography lab in Parsons, Kansas, about an hour east of Wichita. Supposedly, Dwayne's is the last lab in the world to process Kodachrome. I had always thought there were perhaps a dozen or so labs throughout the United State (or at least scattered across the globe) that still processed Kodachrome, but apparently not. Take a look at the slide show here and read the story here. Then, when you're done, check out my favorite scene from the first season of Mad Men, where Don Draper gives a presentation to executives from Kodak. It's when he pitches his idea of what to call Kodak's new circular slide tray.

(up top "Dancing in the Kitchen, Preston, CT, circa 1955," photo courtesy Carol Drong. From the book "Americans in Kodachrome," Twin Palms Publishers, 2002.)

Out on the Streets

2008-11-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

I'd like to take a moment to direct your attention to something I've been working on the past couple of weeks. After my most recent post, in which I talked briefly about homelessness, I searched through all my images just to see what came up. I was somewhat surprised to find I had over a hundred pictures for which I had keyworded "homeless" when saving them to my hard drive. Now, my background in journalism has kept me in check, forcing me to recognize that just because somebody is asleep on a park bench, that doesn't necessarily make them homeless. And how do you define "homeless" anyway? Still, in full disclosure, I sometimes cringe as I am keywording an image I want to save. One such image a few years ago I keyworded: "homeless man asleep sara roosevelt park sleeping bum gutter". Much more common keywords for my pictures in my archive include "bar" "couple" "cellphone" "Houston" "construction" "WTC" "hipster" and "nightlife".

When people ask me what kind of photography I do, I certainly don't say words like "social documentary" or "reportage" or "in-depth" or "long-term." Typically I say "Oh, just New York City imagery. Basically the crazy, quirky stuff you see walking around the streets." (I often cite this Inge Morath picture as being a quintessential NYC quirky photograph.) It's not that I don't appreciate the "Concerned Photographer," it's just that I don't view my photography as being a catalyst for changing the world's ills. That being said, and this being the week of Thanksgiving, I'm going to take a stab at generating some awareness toward our fellow New Yorkers who aren't as fortunate as most of us. Taking one picture of one homeless person doesn't seem like much. But when viewed as a group of images, as a theme I find myself revisiting, as a "body of work" if you will, I think it starts to make a bit of a statement. Click here to view what I am talking about, a short movie I put together using my pictures of the homeless. And when you're done, I would urge you to take a look at the Coalition for the Homeless website (and donate if you are able to) and educate yourself on the principles of harm reduction. At the very least, please try and dig a little deeper into your pockets next time you encounter somebody asking for a little help.

East 1st Street

2008-11-15T11:44:00.000-08:00

Here are two views looking down East 1st Street, from Bowery. One was taken in 2003 with a borrowed Nikon and the other was taken several weeks ago with my cell phone camera (I don't think I need to point out which picture was taken when). It used to be that homeless folks could pretty much set up camp anywhere near or on Bowery. With nothing on that block but old, abandoned buildings and empty parking lots, East 1st Street was pretty much anybody's for the taking. Same with Chrystie between Houston and Stanton, where there was an old refrigerator box that somebody slept in for what seemed like months.

There's a famous bumper sticker I've seen several places that proclaims "I Miss the Old New York." The first time I read that I'm sure I thought it was an arrogant, ignorant statement. But the longer I live in New York the more sense it's begun to make. I'm not so hardened a New Yorker that I can just walk past a beggar or somebody sleeping on the sidewalk and not have it affect me. Yet, anymore, I bet I'd be hard-pressed to find a homeless person anywhere along Bowery other than the breadline outside the Bowery Mission. Nowadays it seems there's nothing but limousines, people smoking outside bars and talking on their phones about how drunk they got two nights ago.

Moonlapse

2008-10-25T17:04:00.000-07:00

Back in July I was asked by an acquaintance of mine to bid on a time lapse job down at the South Street Seaport. The company that he works for, Obscura Digital, specializes in immersive, interactive multimedia environments for marketing events. One of things Obscura does is build planetarium-like domes that utilize sophisticated projection equipment to create 360-degree viewing experiences. Over the course of four days, the dome at the Seaport was host to a marketing event in which Canon was unveiling a new point-and-shoot camera. My job was to do time lapse of the dome going up and coming down as well as some photography of the event itself.

But I had never done time lapse before so I had to put myself through a crash course. I started by tethering my camera to my laptop and using some software to trigger the camera. But the clumsiness of that whole setup totally ruled that idea out. So I went to Adorama to pick up a Canon TC-80N3 remote controller. Immediately, I could tell it was a Godsend. The device is an intervalometer that triggers your camera at any interval of your choosing. Basically you just set it and walk away.

After a few days of experimentation with the TC-80N3, I felt ready for the Obscura job. My first night down at the Seaport I arrived around 7:30 and we put my camera up high in a manlift. I set the intervalometer at one picture every 60 seconds and that was that. About two hours into it, however, I was pained when I saw that a beautiful full moon had begun to rise behind my camera. Over the next couple days all my time lapses were during daylight hours. But on the night they brought the dome down, I had looked up the moonrise time and came prepared to capture it from the opposite side of the dome. After a little trial and error and geometry guesswork, I was able to incorporate about three hours of the moon rising as the dome came down. The building of the dome can be watched here and the dismantling can be watched here.
The next two weeks I spent in Europe. I noticed on a couple nights that the moon, as seen from Warsaw, Poland, was consistently much lower on the horizon–it never seemed to rise as high in the sky as it does in New York. One night the moon was so striking as it set over downtown Warsaw. We could only see it for a few seconds because we were in a taxi on a bridge and once we got off the bridge the buildings blocked the view of the moon.

Back in New York I was determined to harness my newfound appreciation of the moon using time lapse. I poured over moonrise and moonset tables and sent them as text files to my Blackberry. I relished in deciphering which nights would be the best for capturing the moonrise or moonset. It didn't take long for me to become completely obsessed with the moon's whereabouts on any given time of any given day. Whenever I'd leave the apartment I'd immediately start looking for it. It was always rewarding to find it looking down at me through the daytime atmosphere.
It's been fun to go through older pictures I've taken that feature the moon. One such image is the one above, showing the thin sliver of the moon in one of its early waxing crescent phases last October. It's from a friend's balcony on the Lower East Side above the FDR. You can barely see it, it's on the far left side of the frame in the middle, just above the bridges. Click for a larger view. Below is a shot looking east on Rivington during the Blackout of 2003:As for my efforts actually capturing that moon via time lapse, I've had some success. But overall, I still have a ton of learning to do. I've got the timing aspect down pat. But where the moon is is much more tricky to determine than when it's visible. From one day to the next, it never rises or sets in the same spot. I guess a compass would help me figure this out. I have to keep reminding myself that it's earth's spinning on its own axis that results in the moon's "movement." But when I compare the moon's movement as relative to a star in the background–they don't move at the same pace–that's when the gears get going in my head. That's when you can see, over the course of a several-hour time lapse, that the moon is orbiting us at its own slowed-down pace. It makes me think of hands on a clock. Whenever the minute hand passes on top of the hour hand, it always takes place at a different spot on the clock. Such is the case with the moon–whenever it sets we're in a different part of our spin on our axis. These images on the left show the difference in the moon's path from one night to the next.

There's just a ton of moon science that I have taken for granted. For example, the lunar libration is something that totally fascinates me. Also, the interplay of the earth's and the moon's gravities, their barycenter, is equally interesting. The earth orbits around the sun at 30 kilometers per second (almost 67,000 miles per hour) whereas the moon orbits the earth at a mere 1 kilometer per second.
I will leave you with the movie I put together this week showcasing the time lapse sequences I have done in September and October. I would guess it's around 30 hours of time lapse condensed into 2:23. The song is by Philip Sheppard, who wrote the score for the movie "In The Shadow Of The Moon," which I cannot recommend highly enough. The speech is from John F. Kennedy's address at Rice University September 12, 1962. It's also well worth your time.