cary conover - blog

Portfolio Video

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:22:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:42:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:00:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:44:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 00:04:00 +0000

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.

Beck, Then and Now

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:19:00 +0000

I've always said that I'm a complacent music listener. I have a great ear for music, and I know what I like, but I'm not somebody who walks around constantly plugged into an iPod. Far from it. My brother and I got guitars for Christmas in 1984, as well as guitar lessons from a man named Chuck Dooling. Nothing against Mr. Dooling, but I just wasn't into it at all. I think I probably lasted about four weeks before my mom realized that the lessons just weren't our cup of tea. About two and a half years later, however, I picked up the guitar again and started teaching myself, by ear. I remember the guitar lick from Poison's "Talk Dirty To Me" was one of the first riffs I taught myself. A few years later I was able to play along with pretty much every track off Nirvana's "Nevermind."

In 1994 I bought an acoustic guitar, which I still play every once in a while. One of the first "real" songs I taught myself from start to finish was Beck's "Lazy Flies," off the 1998 album "Mutations." I say "real" because it involves a ton of wrist-cramping chord changes. So it was no surprise that when "Sea Change" (which features a ton of acoustic guitar playing) was released I started devouring those songs on my guitar. In February of 2003, after a last-minute announcement that Beck was to perform on SNL, I got the very last two tickets sold in Manhattan for a Valentine's Day show out at Maxwell's in Hoboken. Maxwell's is certainly one small venue, I think its occupancy is only 200 people. The photograph above is from that show, nearly all of which was comprised of songs off "Sea Change".

Fast forward nearly six years later, to this past Wednesday night, at United Palace up on 175th and Broadway. Yvonne and I went to go see Beck with our friend Mark Dantes and it was a really good time. I probably wouldn't have gotten the tickets on my own initiative but a different friend of ours was getting some and asked Yvonne if we'd like a pair. It was a totally different experience than 2003, a much heavier, rocking sound, and of course the elaborate setting that is the inside of UP's main theater was very impressive. Behind the band on stage was a giant curtain containing thousands of tiny LEDs that were synchronized and able to "project" moving images. It was pretty mesmerizing to watch. And the band's set list was quite varied to boot. For me it was quite interesting to take in how much Beck's repertoire has expanded since I last saw him. They played songs from every major album. They opened with "Loser," continued in that vein for a while before switching it up and gather at the front of the stage with headphones and electronic devices to play more "samply" digital stuff such as "Hell Yes" from "Guero" and "Where It's At" from "Odelay." Then they slowed it down and went into "The Golden Age" and other slower acoustic songs from "Sea Change" and elsewhere. I must confess, the one album I hadn't yet heard all the way through was his most recent, "Modern Guilt," and they played a fair amount from that, all of which sounded excellent. For their one encore performance they launched into two songs I hadn't heard, likely also from "Modern Guilt." But yet I felt there was something missing to the entire evening, a song that I couldn't believe they hadn't played yet. Thus, it was a no-brainer to end his show on it, and I immediately recognized it once the drummer started clapping his sticks together in a four-count lead into the impossible-to-miss riff from "E-Pro."

Paul Newman sighting at Perpignan

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:52:00 +0000

One last note about the nightly slide projections at Visa Pour L'Image (as it pertains to, of all people, Paul Newman). This image was taken during my final night in Perpignan and is literally a screen grab showing a sampling of photographs from the Shaw Family Archives, which is distributed in France by the agency Roger Viollet. These images look to be either publicity photographs or behind-the-scenes pictures taken during the filming of "Paris Blues," which starred Paul Newman and Sidney Portier as American expatriate jazz musicians wooing American tourists Joanne Woodward (Newman's wife) and Diahann Carroll. Louis Armstrong is also in the movie, and appears here along with Duke Ellington (perhaps Ellington was technical consultant?). Something I am recalling now is watching the bonus material on the DVD for "The Hustler." Included on the DVD is an interview with Newman, talking about how he was in Paris for "Paris Blues" when he entered into discussions about being cast as Fast Eddie Felson for Robert Rossen's "The Hustler." Originally he had a contract to star in the movie "Two for the Seesaw" with Elizabeth Taylor after "Paris Blues" wrapped. But Taylor was working on "Cleopatra" at the moment and that movie was going into overruns with the photography and required her to stay on longer. This meant Newman was free to take the role of Fast Eddie Felson in "The Hustler" (Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine ended up being cast for "Seesaw.")

I was going to include this image in my posts about the nightly projections at Perpignan, but it didn't seem to show enough context. I'm glad I took the picture with my Leica and not my low-res cellphone camera. It's just a cool thought to think about a young Paul Newman playing a cool cat--surrounded by and working with the coolest cool cats ever, living legends Armstrong and Ellington--even before he was cast as the coolest silver screen cat of them all (at least in my book), Fast Eddie Felson. There is a long list of Paul Newman's movies that I haven't seen. And while "Paris Blues" doesn't seem to have attained the mythical status as some of his other roles, I think "Paris Blues" might just have to go to the top of my list.

Perpignan, part three

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:07:00 +0000

My last full day in Perpignan was characterized by a somewhat renewed sense of energy and optimism. By then my body clock had gotten adjusted to the time difference and I had gained a pretty good sense of the layout of Perpignan. Plus, I recognized people–photographers that I knew who were just then arriving to the festival as well as some familiar faces from throughout my first day. I realized where I really needed to be was a venue I hadn't had time to get to, the Palais des Congrés. That's where all the photo agencies and wire services had set up booths in a very "trade expo" style, not unlike what you'd see at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center. And so I made that the main purpose of my last day at Visa.

At 10 AM I was in line with a handful of other portfolio-carrying photographers outside the Palais. When they let us in I saw a bunch of people go straight to a table where they were passing out translation headsets. So I did just the same and caught the first half hour of a "Meet the Photographer" panel discussion with the photographer Cédric Gerbehaye. The presentation was all in French and it was pretty fascinating to listen to the broadcast of a person translating, in real time, the discussion that was taking place right in front of me. After a while I started to get a little antsy and decided to go see some of the agency folks.

The first room that I encountered was something that I had not expected to find in all of Visa, a room filled with representatives from smaller "boutique" agencies. Collectives, really. I found that most of the photography being done by these groups came the closest to resembling my own work. It was all a lot more stylized, a lot more artsy than all of the "scorched-earth" photojournalism I had seen in all the exhibitions. I showed my work to a woman named Madalena, who works for the Kamera Photo collective in Lisbon, Portugal. There were about 20 total groups represented in the room and it was nice to just go around and collect some of the promotional pieces that were being handed out.

Up in the main exposition hall were all the "big gun" agencies. AP, Getty, Corbis, AFP, Reuters, etc. It was not immediately clear to me who would be the best person to talk to. I wasn't so much expecting to nail down a firm contract with an agency as much as I simply wanted to begin a dialogue and get some feedback. European Pressphoto Agency had a booth that seemed fairly inviting and so I started with them. I was told to come back later and ask for Cengiz Seren, EPA's Editor in Chief. When I returned he warmly welcomed me and offered me a seat. I was telling him about my negative portfolio review the previous day as he opened up my book and started to look through it. He hadn't gotten three pictures into it when he said "You did a fine thing coming here." He kept going back to one of my pictures in particular, the first print of the portfolio, of a canoodling couple in a bar booth. He said it made him think of a Neil Young song. I thought that was a cool thing to say. We chatted for about fifteen minutes, he gave me some great ideas to pursue and we made plans to stay in touch. He suggested I also talk to Guy Cooper at Corbis, who ended up being equally welcoming and generous with his time. As for Cooper's response to what my reviewer said the day before, he said "No, you have absolutely every right to be here." His take on New York City is that it's "enduringly fascinating to the rest of the world" but we also talked about the "endangered species" that is photography in the vein of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, etc. We talked a lot about model releases and the difficulty that can arise by not using them when a client wants to license an image.

After I spoke with Cooper I went over to talk with Dominique Lecourt at Roger-Viollet, which I would describe as a vintage/boutique press agency that's been in existence since 1938. It's actually a reference historical archive and a lot of the imagery they deal with has been acquired from various collections. Because the agency is celebrating it's 70th anniversary this year, a lot of the highlights from its archive were shown at the previous night's projection at the Campo Santo. These images caught my eye because they were black and white portraits of jazz musicians in the 1940s, movie stars like Paul Newman and Marlon Brando back in the day, etc.

A little later on I found myself chatting with Ferit Duzyol of Sipa. I told him how much I liked Göskin Sipahioglu's images at the Eglise des Dominicains and I was pleased to discover how Duzyol had had a hand in making that exhibition. That was pretty much it for one-on-one reviews with people from the big agencies. I actually tried a few others but was told to come back the next day, which is when I was supposed to be flying out. I went back down to the collectives booths and talked to a few more people there before setting out to get some lunch. It doesn't sound like much but this was all spread out over the course of about four hours. I also got a lengthy tutorial on Aperture and was able to hop online, check my email and reserve my seats for my next day's flight to Warsaw via London.

After lunch I headed back to the Hotel Pams to see what all was going on there. I got a little turned around and had to resort to pulling out my map. A rail-thin fellow with a battered Leica asked me where I was going. When I told him he gestured to have me follow him because he ws going there as well. It wasn't until several days later that I realized it was Philip Blenkinsop, who ended up winning the Visa d'Or news prize.

Outside the Pams was a very long line of people waiting to get registered for the festival. I could tell the festival was really starting to get underway. I crushed my way through the main entrance and as I was getting a cup of water I saw a familiar face approaching. It was Lance Miller, the Triumph motorcycle man from the night before. He had taken a look at my booklet of 12 photographs, had been impressed, and thought I'd be a good candidate for an interview for the Canon Professional Network website. His proposal to me was basically, "You're an up-and-coming photographer from New York, this is your first time in Perpignan, we'd like people to hear your story. This could also bring you some attention and possibly help your career out a bit." Soon he was on the phone with an associate, saying "I found the New York photographer, his name is Cary and I want to send him your way." An hour later I was to meet a film crew on the rooftop cafe of the Palais des Congrés. Sure enough, two men come walking in with a bunch of video gear. It was Sean Griffiths working the camera and a sound man, Murray Clarke, recording me as I talked with Evelien Kunst. All three (below) were working as a crew for Red Dot, an Amsterdam-based production company working in Perpignan for Canon, trying to get a wide variety of festival attendees.I basically was asked to talk about my background, my current work in New York, my influences, my reason for coming to Perpignan, my plans for the future, etc. It was kind of a trippy being filmed as onlookers no doubt were thinking "Who on earth is that nobody they're filming over there?" They asked me to flip through my portfolio and talk about a few pictures in particular. In all, I spent about 45 minutes with them. We'll see if that footage ever sees the light of day. It's not important to me if it does or not. What is important is that I came to Perpignan totally alone and yet had managed to meet some great people and get some responses to my work. The entire experience had taken a complete 180-degree turnaround from 24 hours earlier.

Soon it was the long hike back to my hotel to drop off my heavy portfolio and take a quick nap. After cleaning up a bit, it was back into the center of town for my final night's projection. I had stopped at a cafe for a quick bite to eat and watched as people were making their way to the Campo Santo. I finished eating quickly and rushed over. There were about 20 people ahead of me in line when they had to cut off entrance to the inside, apparently it had reached maximum occupancy. Some people were were visibly upset, whereas my mind was already starting to wander ahead to the next morning when I had to catch a 7:15 bus. I almost decided to go back to my hotel and get a good night's sleep. But I figured somewhere there was another entrance. So as best as I could I sort of hugged the perimeter of the Campo Santo, just trying to find access from another area. Sure enough I found a smaller doorway on the east side being guarded by a police officer. A few other people had gotten there just as I did and I snuck in with them, holding out my Visa Pour L'Image name tag. As far as I can tell, I was the very last person allowed into the projection that night.

What followed was yet another amazing evening of dazzling visual choreography on the big screen. It was even better than the first night. The program closed with a spectacular medley of images commemorating the tumultuous year of 1968. Prague Spring, Tet Offensive, MLK and RFK assassinations, revolt in Paris, Black Panthers, you name it. It ended with the astoundingly apt "Earthrise" photograph from Apollo 8 lunar orbital mission on Christmas Eve of 1968. I was the first person in my section of the seats to begin clapping as the credits rolled.

Back over at La Poste afterwards I had a few quick conversations over a few quick beers before I decided I better not risk oversleeping and missing my early bus. So I decided to leave while I was ahead. On my way out through the grand arch of Perpignan's iconic castillet I ran into none other than festival director Jean-Francois Leroy. I said to him exactly this, "I just want to say this is my first Perpignan and I did it all wrong. I have to leave first thing in the morning and was only able to stay two days. But can I just say–the nightly projections were amazing. Totally blown away by them. The sophistication of the sequencing, the music..." and right then a woman had come up and interrupted us, an old friend of his. It didn't matter, I wasn't going to wait around for them to finish talking. I sort of patted him on the back and continued on my way. A couple seconds later I heard him say "Thank You." I looked back and he was waving. I gave him a peace sign and walked on.

Perpignan, part two

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:50:00 +0000

Walking to the Campo Santo on Tuesday night to check out the projection I felt a little better due to the fact that I wasn't carrying my heavy portfolio around like I had been all day. I still needed my map, as I was headed to a part of the city where I hadn't yet ventured. The Campo Santo is a 14th Century cloistered cemetery, apparently one of the oldest in France. For the purposes of Visa, it's basically set up like an amphitheater with stadium-like seating and a gigantic projection screen. Getting into the Campo Santo is kind of an ordeal. There's a massive bottlenecking of the crowd through a kind of winding alley, with only 50 or so people allowed in at a time, every few minutes, I guess to avoid a big crush on the inside. I got in line and slowly crept my way forward with everybody else. Looking around I was trying to find familiar faces but I didn't recognize a soul. Everyone around me was speaking French, and most of the people appeared to be just regular townsfolk (Visa attendees were easily noticeable by the red wristbands). After 15 or so minutes and only 30 feet from where I had started, I overheard a man and a woman behind me who were speaking what was very clearly American English. I wasn't listening to their conversation or anything, I was just sort of bored and getting a little impatient with the slow movement. When I took out my cellphone camera to take a "Hail Mary" picture of all the people in line behind me, I caught a glimpse of the couple. It was Eugene Richards and Janine Altongy. Knowing that they had been right behind me the whole time without me knowing it caused me to be somewhat flummoxed when I went to say hello. We chatted briefly, I told them I was just stopping through Perpignan for a couple days on my way to Warsaw and they said they had just flown through Warsaw. Richards said it was his first time coming to Visa in about fifteen years. I gave him one of my little promotional booklets and the three of us walked into the Campo Santo together.

Right away, my first impression of seeing the inside of the Campto Santo was one of amazement. It was much, much larger than I had envisioned. It's said to accommodate 4,000 people. That's a pretty big audience for a photography slide show. A few minutes after I found a seat up near the top, Visa director Jean-Francois Leroy came onto the stage and addressed the crowd. After that, two professional-looking emcees came onto the stage to introduce the first piece. Then the lights were turned off and the projection began. And I have to say the entire hour that followed was utterly astonishing. It was all in French and I was unaware at that point that I could have gotten a translation headset, but it didn't matter. Just the medieval setting, the stars in the sky, the absolutely perfect weather, the sharpness of the images on the screen, the sophistication of the sequencing, the very effective choices of music, all the French being spoken. Hell, even how everybody around me was smoking cigarettes–I just sort of bathed in it and let the experience wash over my senses. At some point I just felt a sense of "Okay, this festival is worthwhile." I was no longer annoyed by the portfolio review earlier that day, I was just stoked to finally be on the same level with 4,000 other people. It didn't bother me that I basically didn't know a soul, and of course I was still pretty jazzed about running into Richards on the way in. During the slide show I thought to myself "Finally, you've arrived in Perpignan."

After the projection was over with it was time to check out the famed "Café De La Poste." I just sort of followed the crowd and found it fairly easily. That's where I finally started to recognize some faces. Unfortunately, nobody that I knew personally but that was alright. Any time I saw a person with writing or an eye-catching logo on their shirt I would strike up a conversation. I saw a man with a Brooklyn Industries shirt and we chatted about New York. Then I struck up a conversation with a woman with a Timbuk2 bag like mine. Then I saw somebody walking toward me with the "Triumph" logo on his shirt. I said to him "So you're a Triumph man are you?" To which he replied, "Absolutely." Stupidly guessing/assuming that Triumph motorcycles are made in America, I said "Are you American then?" He looked at me kind of funny, said something about Harley Davidson and by then I could easily hear his British accent. Turning the subject to photography I asked him "So if your Triumph was a camera, what kind of camera would it be?" He thought about it and offered that it would probably be an EOS 1D Mark III. I said "So, what, do work for Canon or something?" and he said "I might." And then I said "Well that's gotta be one heck of a motorcycle you ride." To which he said "So where are we going with this, photography or motorcycles?" All kidding aside, I told him I had seen the Canon Ambassadors exhibition and that I really liked it. I told him I was more or less a lifelong Canon shooter, that my workhorse lens, a 28mm f/2.8, was a lens I bought my junior year of high school in 1991. I told him how it was my first Perpignan, and that it hadn't gone too well during the day. I said, "But after tonight and all that amazing work I just saw..." nodding in the direction of the Campo Santo. Then he more or less finished my sentence, "Now you'll be coming back every year right?" That was about it for the conversation. We shook hands, he told me his name was Lance, and I gave him one of my booklets. I walked back to my hotel pretty satisfied with how the evening had gone, and with a much better outlook for the remainder of the festival.

Perpignan, part one

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:58:00 +0000

I've been back since Sunday night and have been slowly easing back into the rhythm of New York City. Warsaw was a great time, a beautiful city, and I met a lot of wonderful people there. As for Perpignan and Visa Pour L'Image, my experience there was equally positive and uplifting. But I will say that I really had to work hard to make it worthwhile. From the get-go, I knew I'd only have two days to get as much out of the festival as possible. I absolutely had to be in Warsaw on Saturday the 6th, so that meant I had to leave Perpignan mid-week, just as the majority of the people were arriving. But I definitely got a good sense of how the festival works and I look forward to attending again in the future.

My overnight trip to Perpignan, via Dublin and Barcelona, was a long and exhausting one. I landed in Barcelona at about 10:15 AM on Monday, September 1st. By then I was really starting to feel the effects of jetlag, especially after not getting any sleep on either of my flights. The real problem was that I had set up too strict of an itinerary for myself once I was on the ground. Once I had waited in line to get my passport stamped, then waited around for my luggage to appear and then finally gotten on board the Aerobus that was to take me into the center of Barcelona near the bus station, I knew I had cut it too close. I had planned to catch an 11:45 bus from Barcelona to Girona, Spain but I missed it by a mere four minutes. As I result, I missed my final bus, a 1:15 from Girona on into Perpignan. Long story short, I got to Perpignan around 8 PM instead of 3 PM. Fortunately my hotel was right near the train/bus station so that was convenient. I got checked in and unpacked at the hotel, washed up a little and set off into the center of Perpignan with a map to try to get my bearings for the next day. It didn't even occur to me that I could have made that night's projection at Campo Santo. But by that point I was completely spent and all I could think about was getting a good night's sleep.

The next morning I got registered at the Hotel Pams around 10 AM. Then I got signed up for a critique with a picture editor affiliated with ANI, Association Nationale des Iconographes. But that wasn't scheduled until 4 PM so I had plenty of time to check out all the exhibitions in the various venues around the old part of town. It's hard to say, I saw so much work, but probably the images that stuck out the most were Göskin Sipahioglu's images from Paris in May, 1968. These were on display in the Eglise des Dominicains, which just by itself is a pretty amazing space, but was made all the more impressive when lined with beautiful black and white prints.Around 3PM I went over and hung out in the courtyard at the Hotel Pams. I felt slightly awkward not knowing a soul, save for John Trotter, who I am surprised remembered me from so long ago. I recognized a few faces but for the most part I was a total loner.

Although I suppose it would have been perfectly appropriate to approach anybody sitting in that courtyard for a quick, casual portfolio critique, or even just shop talk, I wish it would have been more explicit. As in, designate one specific area of the courtyard and have it be solely for people who want to show their work around. I struck up a conversation with an Italian photographer sitting nearby, Eduardo Castaldo, and we looked at each other's portfolios. One of the last things he said to me before my ANI critique was something to the effect of "Now I know what I should have brought to show." I took it as a compliment.

Not knowing what to expect from my ANI reviewer, I went in with an open mind. But it didn't take long for the encounter to veer off in an uncomfortable direction. Basically, my reviewer said "You don't belong at Visa. Visa is all about hardcore photojournalism. This black and white is passé. You need to be showing color pictures, news pictures, reportage, tearsheets, etc." I am summarizing, of course, but that was the basic tone of it. I was slightly offended by how the reviewer didn't even look at every print in my book, and actually flipped through it three or four pages at a time. It was disheartening, and not because the person said Visa was the wrong place to be showing my kind of photography (in fact, that actually was somewhat close to what I had been expecting to hear). It was disheartening because at that point I thought it was going to be my one and only opportunity to show my work around to a professional. I had actually gone to Perpignan thinking I was going to be meeting with dozens of people. Eventually I just kind of relented and nodded a lot, with a lot of "Uh huh" "Yeah" and "Okay, I see." But it was a pretty uninspired review. At one point the person looked at their watch. "Oh, are we about out of time?" I asked. "No, actually, we've got a whole fifteen minutes left," implying that there was so much time to say so little. I thanked the person and left with ten minutes to spare and walked back to my hotel take a nap.

As I was lying around it was hard to resist the temptation to just stay in my room and sleep through that whole night, that's how tired I was. And I was seriously beginning to worry about getting back to Barcelona on time for my 1 PM flight on the 4th. One missed bus connection like I had on my way into Perpignan would have meant missing my flight to Warsaw. I considered leaving the very next morning, on Wednesday the 3rd, and just spending the whole day photographing in Barcelona. But then I'd have to find a hotel without doing any advance research, so I just decided to stick it out in Perpignan. I got out of bed, put on a fresh shirt and hoofed it back into the city center, still very much uncertain about the whole experience, not very happy with the way it was going.

Out of the office

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:07:00 +0000

I am currently in Warsaw, Poland and will be for the rest of this week before heading back to New York on Sunday. Last week I spent a few days in Perpignan, France for Visa Pour L'Image, an international photojournalism festival. I will have many stories to report and hopefully some photos. But internet access has been spotty, and my morning routine as of late is nothing like my coffee-and-headlines mornings in New York. But I'm having a great time in Europe. Stay tuned.

Ryan Hilke

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:30:00 +0000

I want to give a shout out to an amazing young photographer I had the privilege of working with last month at the Flint Hills Publications Workshop in Manhattan, Kansas. The photographer, Ryan Hilke, is a senior at Liberty High School in Liberty, Missouri, which is just northeast of Kansas City. First, however, a few words about the workshop.

The workshop has taken place on the campus of Kansas State University every summer since the late 1950s. It's an intensive five-day workshop that attracts about 300 high schoolers from about 15 states. The kids who attend the workshop are editors, reporters, photographers and designers for their respective high school newspapers and yearbooks. Each year there are about 30 students who enroll in the photography sequence of the workshop. I have been a photography instructor at this workshop since 1998, along with a rotating cast of usually two other instructors. While it is a grueling week of 13-hour days in the brutal, Kansas-in-July heat, it nevertheless is always the highlight of my summer.

It's a unique workshop in the sense that very little of it takes place in the classroom–we don't just sit around in the AC and talk about philosotography. Nope, these photographers are responsible for documenting the entire week 24/7 and for providing photographs for the workshop's three main publications. First, there's the Kedzie Krier Newspaper, which is a 16-page broadsheet that is printed on the last day of the workshop for students to read and take home with them. The Krier is like any regular newspaper with news stories, features, Op/Ed columns and even classified ads. Then there's the Wildcat Yearbook, which has more of a keepsake feel to it, like any yearbook. It's the publication that has all the group shots in it, and each spread is designed around the overall theme of the workshop (this year's was something semi-corny like "What's In It For U?"). The Wildcat ships out to all the attendees a few months after the workshop is over. Finally, there's the New Media class that puts out a DVD with a ton of videos and other interactive goodies that students have come up with. One aspect of this DVD is the end-of-workshop slideshow that is a showcase for all the photographers' pictures. This DVD is bundled inside and shipped along with the Wildcat.

The Krier and Wildcat both require that the photographers get names for their subjects and write detailed captions. Actually, we demand this for every picture in each photographer's "selects" folder. And I can't tell you how many times we stressed this point, daily, about getting the names of subjects. We'd give little prizes to the photographers if we saw them carrying a notebook around and getting names of people who they weren't already friends with from school. But getting caption information is a new idea for most of these kids and their excuses for not getting names ranged from "I forgot," to "I didn't want to bother them," to "Can't I just go out and get it later?"

Toward the end of the week we had to start thinking about giving out awards to the photographers. But it was kind of an "off" year, there weren't really any photographers that totally stood out or showed much improvement throughout the week. And we were plagued by these captionless photos. There was of course one exception to this and that's Ryan Hilke. When crunch time came on deadline night for the publications, Ryan's pictures were all captioned and ready to go. And they were great pictures. Some kids could barely muster five usable images from the entire week. But by Wednesday, Ryan had about 20 selects in his folder. Early in the week we had given the kids a little spiel about how, when photographing in dark situations in the same room as 30 other photographers using flashes, to try and capture other people's flashes using long exposures. Ryan took this advice and totally ran with it. From what I recall he had several pictures using this technique that were totally amazing. These two pics are his two favorite images from the week. I applaud Ryan for turning off his flash and for his experimentation. He was a natural choice for an award we like to give each year (but never refer to as) "Best Photographer of the Workshop." So we created a one-time award specifically for him with the most academic-sounding title we could come up with, "The Ryan Hilke Award for Excellence in Photojournalism." He was super stoked when we presented the award to him, I think mainly because he wasn't expecting it. But we'd like to wish him the best of luck this year at Liberty and to urge him to continue with his photography.

Snapshot from a window seat

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:19:00 +0000

This is the first time that I can ever recall flying up the Hudson River when coming into New York City's airspace en route to LaGuardia Airport. I'm accustomed to flying along the east side of Manhattan, above the East River. Fortunately I was seated on the right side of the airplane and had this view straight down into The Pit. This is actually looking out the window of the passenger who was sitting behind me.

Eight years ago, August 8th, 2000

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:45:00 +0000

Today the world looks to China, the beginning of the 2008 Olympics, and the cool date of 08-08-08. But my mind is totally elsewhere. That's because eight years ago today I made my move to this great city, on August 8, 2000. At the time I had just wrapped up three and a half years of hard work as a photographer for the Monroe Evening News in Monroe, Michigan. It had been my first real job and I still have fond memories of those post-college years of 1997 to 2000.

Logistically, I think the moment it hit me that I was moving was when I sold my car at an auto auction on the night of August 7th. At that point I had already sold off all my big stuff: furniture items such as my couch, coffee table, kitchen table and chairs, my bed, dresser, lamps, television, etc. And pretty much everything else, my books, clothes and a bunch of boxes, had already been loaded into a U-Haul. I remember going to get some lunch the next day and having to drive that clumsy, loaded U-Haul around town to get all my last-minute things done. It quickly became apparent that I just needed to hit the road that night instead of waiting for the next morning. So at some point around 5PM on the 8th I took a power nap on the floor of my empty apartment and a few hours later I was on the road.

I was leaving behind a very nice apartment, 1349 Mario Drive. It was easily 800 square feet, had vaulted ceilings, a private patio, dish washer, etc. And it only cost $565 per month. What I was about to move into was a 450-square-foot one-bedroom apartment with the toilet in the bedroom and the shower off the kitchen. The rent for that cost $1600 per month. That was 11 Stanton Street, just off Bowery. My good friend, Patrick Witty, had moved into it several weeks earlier. He and I had split the deposit, which was a whopping six months rent up front because neither of us had any proof of NYC income at that point. A couple months later we took on a third tenant, who slept on a cot in the kitchen for several months.

It's hard to characterize those first few months in NYC. It was one big party, to be sure, especially with a constant stream of friends always passing through town ("Hey, you guys mind if I crash on your floor for a while?"). But it was also a bit stressful, just having such a blank slate in front of me. Right off the bat, I quickly got work from Staci Schwartz, who had just become photo editor at the Village Voice. So that was a real blessing, to at least be getting assignments here and there to stave off the depletion of my precious savings.

The year 2000 was a point in my life where I was truly free, no obligations, no family to support. It hasn't been the easiest eight years but I can say unequivocally that I am passionate about where I live. I am absolutely thrilled to be a New Yorker. And that's something to be celebrated.

Man On Wire

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:17:00 +0000

I'm a little slow in writing about a great movie that opened as I was out of town last week. It's called "Man On Wire" and I had been eagerly awaiting its opening. Watching it was the first thing I did when I got back into town this week. "Man On Wire" is a documentary (directed by James Marsh) about Philippe Petit, a French tightrope artist who rigged a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and made eight crossings over the course of 45 minutes on the morning of August 7, 1974. The movie details the several years leading up to the walk and it features some great footage from two of his other famous tightrope performances: between the towers of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris (1971) as well as between two towers at the entrance of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (1973). I've been a huge fan of Petit's ever since I bought his book, "To Reach The Clouds" when it came out in 2002. The book gets very detailed about the logistics of how he and his cohorts achieved access to the towers, how they got the wire rigged, etc. It was published six months after 9/11 and so it ends on a more sombre, memorial tone than the movie. "Man On Wire" has a decidedly more triumphant feel, and 9/11 is never mentioned directly.

There are countless reviews of the movie online, but A.O. Scott's review in The New York Times features several clips from the movie (that paper's original report from 1974 can be read here.) In the Village Voice, Jim Ridley puts it best by saying that Petit's walk across the void between the towers was akin to "staring down the limits of what is humanly possible." It's amazing to think Petit was still a teenager when he came up with the idea, and a week shy of his 25th birthday when he actually performed the walk.

In the book, Petit goes into great detail about every aspect of "le coup." One such detail is how Petit, as he was rigging his own wire, noticed that a narrow aluminum working platform hanging several floors down from the top of the building had been hastily rigged and was dangerously loose. So whenever he had an extra minute he would go over to tighten and reinforce the rigging for his "brothers, the aerial construction workers." He writes that the most dangerous aspect of the day was not the tightrope walk itself, but the manner in which the cops shoved him down the stairwell on the way down after he was arrested. With his hands cuffed behind him, he had little control over his balance and on a couple occasions nearly smashed his skull in as he tried to avoid falling.

I have many questions for Petit, most of which are technical. For one, if he had somehow gained absolute permission to perform the walk, what would he have done differently? Also, I'd always read that one tower was taller than the other by six feet. I'd like to know if the wire was perfectly parallel with the horizon or if the difference in building heights required it to be rigged at an angle. And if that was necessarily a disadvantage. It started raining minutes after he got off the wire. Would he have continued if it had started to rain before he walked? One question that was asked recently of Petit by Reed Tucker of The New York Post goes as follows: Q) Is it true wire walkers aren't supposed to look down?

Petit's reply: "It's a legend. I don't know where it comes from. Maybe it comes from people who are not accustomed to height and think that if you look down, you're more easily assailed by the void. But I am not there by chance - I am there by choice. I live to be there on the roof and look down. It doesn't bother me. It is treacherous on a high wire to change your focus point and suddenly look down. But I wanted, needed to look down. I wanted the joy of remembering where I was to be there for eternity. What I saw is imprinted in my memory and will never be erased."

(The Old) Penn Station

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:30:00 +0000

In May and June I made three trips on the Long Island Rail Road via trains departing from and returning to Pennsylvania Station. Of course I've been to Long Island many other times before that, usually by rental car or catching a ride with friends. But on one of my recent trips I noticed a stone marker above a southern stairway entrance to Penn Station's LIRR waiting room that tells the reader, "You Are Here." Above the words is an architectural blueprint-like rendering of what the old station used to look like when viewed from the south. Despite the marker's lack of context or explanation, it ignited my curiosity about the old days.

Truth be told, I've long known the basic history of the station, namely that the above-ground portion of it was torn down in the 1960s to make way for the current Madison Square Garden. I knew that its loss caused a community uproar that eventually lead to the formation of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. But it was the nuts and bolts of the old station that I wanted to get to know–its "footprint," if you will. And so for the past few weeks I've been trying to track down a book of photographs that I remember seeing last year, titled "The Destruction of Penn Station." The other day, after checking every bookstore I could think of, I finally found a copy, appropriately, at the Borders bookstore at One Penn Plaza. As the book's title suggests, it's rather heavy with pictures showing the station's dismantling from late 1963 until the middle of 1966. The photographer, Peter Moore, lived near Penn Station and so it was very easy for him to make regular trips to document the process. In all, he made about thirty trips throughout the two and a half years of the station's deconstruction. In the few pictures at the beginning of the book, Moore does a nice job of capturing the dignity of the station in its last months (Concourse at left and Main Waiting Room below). In fact, those were the pictures that I found myself looking at the most. I found a lot of other pictures elsewhere, online mostly, including this collection, that show the station in its heyday, from completion in 1910 up until the early 1960s.In the book there are some nice essays as well, one of which quotes Thomas Wolfe from his book "You Can't Go Home Again," when the main character, George Webber, walks into Penn Station's Main Waiting Room: "The station, as he entered it, was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Great, slant beams of moted light fell ponderously athwart the station's floor, and the calm voice of time hovered along the walls and ceiling of that mighty room, distilled out of the voices and movements of the people who swarmed beneath. It had the murmur of a distant sea, the langorous lapse and flow of waters on a beach. It was elemental, detached, indifferent to the lives of men...Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and...there was a superb fitness in the fact that one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station."

Known primarily for his photographs of avant-garde performances, Moore (1932-1993) worked briefly at Life Magazine's darkrooms. In the 1950s he was an assistant to the photographer O. Winston Link. He hung out with David Heath and Garry Winogrand and he even participated in a workshop hosted by W. Eugene Smith. He eventually became Senior Technical Editor of Modern Photography Magazine until 1989. "The Destruction of Penn Station" was edited by his wife, Barbara, and published in 2000. The book is wonderful and I'm totally grateful for Moore's "humble, evidentiary work" (a phrase borrowed from Joel Meyerowitz) that documents the station's dismantling.

The architecture critic Vincent Scully famously wrote that with the old station, "One entered the city like a god." With its replacement, "One scuttles in now like a rat." It's hard not to agree, especially considering how low the ceilings are in some areas of the subway connections/entrances. Taking a few laps in and around Penn Station, a few words come to mind: crowded, maze, tunnel, cramped, underground, artificial light. For reference, here are some random shots of the Penn Station of 2008:And below are a few overall pictures I've taken inside Madison Square Garden (Republican National Convention in 2004, a boxing match also in 2004, and the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in 2005).The original Penn Station station was built by the architects McKim, Mead and White. It was based, in part, on the Roman baths of Caracalla. The Beaux-Arts style building was widely considered to be a masterpiece of architectural classicism, and it was the biggest indoor space in New York City at the time. I think it's important to realize that the original station was built when the automobile was in its infancy and that it connected New York City with the continental United States for the first time. By the 1960s, however, maintaining the aging station had become too costly. And the Pennsylvania Rail Road had been struggling to bring revenue into the station. Taking it down and replacing it with something more commercial must've seemed like the easiest route. I'm not going to get into the politics of why it was torn down, or even current plans to resurrect the station in the Farley Post Office Building across the street. But looking back, one can easily see the forces of capitalism at play.

I think it would have been cool to take pictures inside the old station. I suspect that the available light in its western-most concourse area was much-loved by photographers for decades. My favorite picture by Louis Faurer is a picture from Penn Station (right). When I first began studying Peter Moore's photographs, I had a hard time figuring out which direction was which. But eventually it came to me (much like the time I figured out where that famous Grand Central Station image was taken from) that if you start with the Main Waiting Room and orient yourself accordingly to the incoming sunlight, it's very easy to tell which way is east and which way is west. On the exterior it was a little more difficult to tell which Avenue was which (7th or 8th), unless of course the Empire State Building was in the background of the photograph.

I've been writing this post for weeks, in fits and starts. It has occupied a large part of my thinking about NYC history lately. But how can somebody who's never set foot in the old station even begin write about it with authority? I guess anybody who knows me knows I have a pretty strong sense of nostalgia, photographic in particular. In the end, thankfully, we have the photos. The saddest thing to deal with is the fact that the documenting of the destruction of Penn Station was likely much more unmonitored and, therefore, considered much less suspicious than, the documenting of the reconstruction of the World Trade Center has been (Editor's Note: Peter Moore did seek, and receive, permission from the railroad's PR department and was granted access to otherwise restricted demolition areas, with no hard hat required). Forty-five years after the fact, it doesn't seem right that there aren't more photographic books dedicated to this topic (the destruction). No doubt forty-five years from now there'll be dozens of photography books detailing the rebuilding of the WTC.

The New York Times, in its "Farewell to Penn Station" editorial dated October 30, 1963, said it best: "Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed."

Time Well Spent?

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:04:00 +0000

I just came across some slides that I shot three years ago in early April, 2005. They were taken with my Olympus Pen-F half frame camera. I decided not to scan them back then because I was seriously lacking in hard drive capacity. But last week I made nine or so scans and stitched this panoramic together. Pictured above is the east side of Bowery between Houston and First Streets. Toward the right half of the image is Avalon Chrystie Place (with the reflective windows) and the empty lot toward the left, as well as the brick buildings in the middle, show what is to become Avalon Bowery Place. The five-story tenement building in the center is 295 Bowery, which over a hundred years ago was the infamous McGurk's Suicide Hall. According to a 1999 New York Times article, "The building had been a hotel during the Civil War, catering to returning soldiers. By the 1890's it was a brothel and a dive where it is said a half-dozen destitute courtesans drank carbolic acid and died. John H. McGurk, the owner of the saloon on the ground floor, then capitalized on the notoriety of the place by renaming it McGurk's Suicide hall." For an in-depth, yet not-too-lengthy primer on what Bowery has become, there's the 2003 article "Palimpsest Street" by Kevin Baker. Here's what the same block looks like after construction was completed (taken from the Avalon Bowery Place website):I realize none of this breaking news. The new Whole Foods Bowery, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, both are old-hat topics. As I said, I just came across these pictures and decided to scan them three years after the fact. As I've been pondering the rebirth of Bowery lately I'm recalling how I got into it with some folks at the bar a couple weeks ago, regarding the progress at Ground Zero. The rebuilding of the World Trade Center is a very touchy topic upon which any two New Yorkers will rarely agree, the rate of the rebuilding, the overall politics, logistics, etc. So many factors coming into play down there. Perhaps it's a bit of an apple-and-oranges comparison, as there's a lot more below-grade infrastructural work going on downtown, transportation hubs, etc. The only reason I even compare the two (Bowery/Houston to Ground Zero) is because it certainly has gotten to the point where the redevelopment of Houston from Broadway to Ludlow as well as that of Bowery from Delancey to St. Mark's Place has far outpaced that of Ground Zero (see map for relative sizes of areas of redevelopment). As we approach our seventh Independence Day since 9/11, ask yourself this: Is it too soon to start wondering why we haven't seen the kind of rampant, white-hot redevelopment downtown within the 16 acres of Ground Zero as we've been seeing everywhere else in the city? Perhaps this fall we'll finally start to see some above-grade skyward-bound progress on the Freedom Tower. (Ground Zero photographed mid-May, 2008).

Luc Sante talks about Street Photography

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:58:00 +0000

There's an excellent interview with Luc Sante over at the WNYC Street Shoots blog. Here is the direct link to the interview. It was just announced that Sante will be one of the judges for the Street Shots Challenge. There's still one day left to enter, so get to it.

My favorite part of the interview is when he's asked why he thinks street photography is so popular. His reply: "New York Street Photography is popular in the same way that Rock and Roll is popular. It's a genre that has so much energy in it that it never quite seems to be exhausted. And people are driven to it by the energy and don't think about whether it's formerly exhausted or not." He goes on to make a great analogy about photographing New York: "Everybody's been photographing the pyramids since the invention of photography just about, and they're going to keep on photographing the pyramids until either photography or the pyramids disappear, whichever comes first."

50mm

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:05:00 +0000

Several years ago I bought a book called "The World Of Henri Cartier-Bresson" at A Photographer's Place on Mercer Street. In it, there's a picture I had never seen before in any other Cartier-Bresson book. The picture (above, right) is from Japan in 1965 and it's got a wonderful, slightly chaotic, multi-directional composition to it. The receipt for my copy of that book is dated February 10, 2001. Less than two weeks before I bought the book, however, I took a picture (above, left) that is eerily similar to his. The reason I know it was taken two weeks before I bought the book is because when I shot my picture, at a flea market on 24th and Sixth Avenue, I had just come from a bookstore nearby where I had bought a different HCB book ("Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work"). And my receipt for that book is dated January 28, 2001. Of course even though this is a huge coincidence, and it wasn't until probably several months later that I registered the similarity, it is a huge nod to Mr. Cartier-Bresson and the undeniable pull his work has had on me.

This all comes to mind because of a different-but-somewhat-related thought I had this weekend, walking through Union Square Park, when I came upon a young woman sitting on a bench playing her acoustic guitar and singing. I thought to myself, "What can you really do with just your voice and an acoustic guitar that hasn't been done already?" And then a parallel idea occurred to me: what she was doing with her music is pretty much what I do with my photography. It's not a rule I live by, but I definitely am a big believer in "one camera, one lens" type of photography, just as this woman was performing with "one instrument, one voice." Music and photography is a very easy and often-discussed comparison. But it begs the question, "What is it, exactly, that I think I'm doing with my photography that hasn't been done already?" Is there really anything I will have "achieved" at the end of my career that will have gone beyond merely "experimenting within tradition"? I suppose there's a lot of material out there I could read, and one title in particular comes to mind (and is a phrase I love to use), The Anxiety of Influence. In the end, I suppose we should all just stick to our guns and do what comes naturally, and not, as Cartier-Bresson said, get bogged down by "proving or asserting [our] own originality."

The Saya

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:17:00 +0000

Some time about a month ago I was walking west on 23rd Street when I couldn't help but notice an extremely tall and narrow building under construction off in the distance. It was one of those increasingly common moments where I thought to myself "Gee Cary, you stay away from a certain part of town too long and next time you're back there's a huge building already topped out." As I got closer I could see the building was going up right where Madison Avenue begins at 23rd. It's basically going up on the southeast corner of Madison Square Park. It was not difficult to find information on the project. By simply googling "high rise" "23rd" and "Madison Square Park" I learned that the building is called The Saya and will have the notable address of One Madison Avenue. I didn't really give it any more thought until about a week later, as I was flying back into New York from Kansas. Coming up the East River en route to La Guardia Airport, I was looking out the window on the left side of the plane watching the numbered streets of Manhattan drift by below me. My eye immediately latched onto The Saya, and it was somewhat startling to make the connection between the building I was looking at from the air and the building I had seen on street level a week earlier.

Not surprisingly, I am pretty late to discover such real estate happenings (unless they're right in the immediate vicinity of where I've lived the past 8 years, the swath of Manhattan that I like to call NoLiHoSoLo). Curbed, however, is all over this kind of stuff. From Curbed I was able to find out a lot about the building itself, as well as a condo that recently had its price lowered by over $900,000 due to its uptown view being blocked by The Saya. And over at skyscraperpage.com I found a ton of great pics, as well as some interesting renderings of the building, one of which is at left. Okay so whatever, a big high rise is going up on 23rd Street. I'll never live in it, so that was pretty much the end of my interest. Until, about another week later when I was walking down Broadway near 13th, through a street fair, when I turned back to look uptown. That's when I saw The Saya totally jutting up right smack dab in between the Empire State Building and the old Metropolitan Life Tower (which also overlooks Madison Square Park, just a stone's throw from The Saya). Click here for an older post concerning those two skyscrapers. Below are two photos that show the uptown view before (left) and during (right) construction of the building. The photo on the right was with my cell phone, so please excuse the quality. But it definitely gives you a sense of the skyline disruption. I've always known that New York City is pretty much the only city in America that continually has buildings under construction that are taller than the tallest buildings in 90 percent of all other American cities. For example, the tallest building is Wichita is about 26 stories tall and wouldn't make a dent on NYC's skyline. On the other hand, The Saya, at about 50 stories tall, makes a pretty significant poke in the eye of lower midtown Manhattan, no matter from which angle you view it (and I didn't even notice it until it was 90 percent topped out). The Saya is going to be about as tall as the old Met Life Tower, which only 100 years ago was the tallest building in the world (from 1909-1913).

CB's Gallery

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:50:00 +0000

This picture was taken August 21, 2002 on the opening night of a group exhibition I was in at what used to be CB's Gallery, 313 Bowery, right next to CBGB's. About six months earlier I had submitted some of my work in the hopes of getting into one of the gallery's monthly group shows. I remember being in Kansas in July of that year when I got the call saying I had been chosen to participate in a show that was going to be called "Common Bonds." So once I got back to New York I went into CB's Gallery to measure and photograph the walls that I would be using (essential tasks when planning an exhibition). The opening on August 21st worked out perfectly, because the very next morning I had scheduled to fly back to Wichita to attend my 10-year high school reunion (which I had organized).

Details have gotten a little fuzzy since then. All I know is that I had 21 prints total on display. Eight of those were 16x20s and were displayed at the front of the gallery. Hanging the 16x20s was extremely tense because it involved a rickety two-ladder balancing act above a stairwell. My high school friend James Nguyen, who is about 50 pounds lighter than I am, helped me with this. I was pretty proud of how it turned out. But the 13 prints on the back walls weren't initially supposed to be that spread out. Originally, I was only supposed to get the very back wall (the one with the angled top). But on the day when all the artists were supposed to show up and hang their work, the large wall on the right was unclaimed. Apparently the person the gallery director had chosen for that wall hadn't even replied to her phone calls. So she was more than happy to give me the extra space. And am I glad because I think I had some horrible plan to try a 3x5x3 cluttered mess with 11 prints. Needless to say, everything worked out much better using two walls. The two prints on the far left were total afterthoughts that I think I hung fifteen minutes before the opening. One was an older print made for a different show and the other was an Epson print I did and threw into a frame.

I have fond memories of that night (here's a brief slide show, click each image to advance). Every once in a while I'll see somebody walking on the street that I remember from the opening, somebody who had just come in off the street. I always cite that experience as being one of my earliest successes in New York. In recent years I might even dare say there's perhaps a whiff of prestige having been affiliated with the gallery before CBGB's closed down (one of my pictures from the show was actually taken inside CBGB's). CB's Gallery recently reopened as an outpost of the Morrison Hotel Gallery. Below is a picture from the most recent opening, last month, featuring the rock photography of Bob Gruen. The place has been entirely gutted, so it was a big surprise to see how cavernous the space really is. I highly recommend going in to see Gruen's photos. So many of them have been etched into my brain for as long as I can remember. In an era when everyone's bemoaning the loss of how things used to be, complaining about the upscale John Varvatos store coming in and taking over the CBGB's space, it's been the gallery next door that I've kept my eye on. Walking into the Morrison Hotel Gallery and feeling the abundance and prominence of the photography, I definitely know at least that space got into the right hands. (photograph below by Rick Edwards)

Manhattan '45

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:36:00 +0000

I came across a phrase a few weeks ago that really grabbed me. The phrase is simple: "the future about to occur." I Googled the phrase in quotations and discovered it's from a book called "Manhattan '45" written by Jan Morris. The book is filled with lots of eloquent descriptions about New York from that year and it's impossible to read the excerpts I've found and not feel nostalgia.

Perhaps the main reason why I reacted so strongly to Morris' book was because I had been in search of a way to convey, verbally, my own experience of New York. My mission was to give non-New Yorkers some insight into what the city is like now, via my photography. But instead of simply showing them only my pictures, I wanted to get them into a "New York state of mind" and show them some classics. All of this was preparation for a talk I gave last week at Wichita State University. To make a long story short, a former workshop student of mine, Landon Taylor, who is now president of the WSU Photography Guild, recently acquired some funding from the university's Student Government Association to pay for a speaker to come to Wichita and talk to the guild. He had pitched the idea to me in March and over the past few weeks we've been planning my visit. The funding not only covered airfare, hotel accommodations and printing of publicity fliers for the talk, it also included a modest honorarium for my time and preparation. The talk was this past Friday at WSU's McKnight Art Center.

Again, what excited me the most was the opportunity to show some iconic mid-20th Century photographs of Manhattan. What came to mind immediately were pictures from the 1930s, such as the shafts of sunlight beaming down into Grand Central Station, the Rockefeller Center construction workers having lunch on a steel beam, even a shot from the original 1933 production of King Kong. From the 1950s of course there's the shot of James Dean walking in Times Square in the rain. But arguably the most famous Times Square picture, Alfred Eisenstadt's masterpiece from V-J Day of the soldier kissing the nurse, was taken on August 15, 1945. This fact conveniently coincided with the title of Morris' book. And so with her words and many, many photographs in mind, I set out to write an opening script that I would read as narration accompanying an introduction to my presentation. After ten or so minutes of that I jumped to modern-day New York, the city I moved to on a hot day in August of 2000.

Obviously, what "The Greatest Generation" had as one of its biggest New York moments is about as polar opposite from my what my generation experienced on September 11, 2001. When I think of how old I was that day, compared to the average age of most soldiers on August 15, 1945, I get a little emotional. When I think of the euphoria and relief of the war being over then, compared to the unlikelihood of a specific victory date ever being declared in this current war, I get more than a little worried. Nearly seven years after 9/11, the city is still very much haunted by that day. And to think that the United States accomplished as much as it did in the period between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day, compared to its recent involvement in Iraq since 2003, is just flat-out depressing. I have many feelings about our country's current situation in the Middle East, but none of them are as strong as my frustration that we're even there in the first place.

With this in mind, I'll leave you with some lines from Manhattan '45. She begins her book describing the Queen Mary as it entered New York Harbor in June of 1945 carrying 15,000 US soldiers, the first contingent of troops returning home from the battlefields in Europe. Victorious and well-mannered, the first thing they asked for when they disembarked was milk.

"The Manhattan skyline shimmered in the imaginations of all the nations. Its buildings stood there metal-clad, steel-ribbed, glass-shrouded, colossal and romantic—everything that America seemed to represent in a world of loss and ruin." She continues: "[New York] was not only bound to be, in the postwar years, the supreme and symbolical American city. All the signs were that it would be the supreme city of the Western world, or even the world as a whole...This crowded island was the head, the brain, the essence of America, and the idea of America was omnipotent then...It was the present tantalizingly sublimated. It was the Future about to occur.” Looking back from 1987, Morris writes: “The moment of grace soon passed—it lasted no more than a few years, and by the mid-1950s was fast becoming hardly more than a regretful memory. New York was never to lose its excitement, its power to move, its limitless energy; but never again, perhaps, would it possess the particular mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality, generosity and self-amazement, which seems to have characterized it in those moments of triumph.”
(Photo credits: top, Alfred Eisenstadt; middle, US Navy Photo; bottom, Louis Faurer.)

Adams, Freedman in Sunday NYT

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:17:00 +0000

One of the first things I checked out on the internet Saturday morning was an audio slide show about photographs by Ansel Adams taken in Yosemite National Park. It was in the Travel section of NYT. The headline for the story was pretty straightforward: "What Ansel Adams Saw Through His Lens." The commentary was done by Andrea Stillman, development director at the Morgan Library and Museum, who used to be an assistant for Adams in the 1970s. The full story and slideshow can be found here. There was one especially noteworthy anecdote by Stillman that I wanted to share. She explains that Adams was hired by the Kodak company to go out and make some color shots in the park. According to Stillman, he was paid $250 for every 8x10 Kodachrome he took. In particular, Kodak apparently was looking for shots of waterfalls and rainbows. When Adams found a suitable waterfall/rainbow scenario he wouldn't just expose the Kodachromes, he'd also shoot black and white. Stillman explains "As an artist he felt that he could not make a creative statement in color, because people would expect the color photograph to exactly mirror nature. Whereas when he was working in black and white he could create what he called 'a departure from nature.'" I liked that. Many photographers get exposed very early on in their careers to masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank. For me, Ansel Adams was the first famous photographer I ever discovered. And this was right at the same time I was just learning the basics of photography, in my pre-photojournalism years. Indeed, it was the landscape of my hometown, the trees and creeks, the grain silos and abandonded railroad tracks, that I responded to, long before I ever had to photograph other people. I emailed a nice comment to the Times' interactive team that put the piece together.So then again yesterday morning I was looking at the NYT online when I saw the word "Weegee" in a headline that read "Through Weegee's Lens." A few moments later I discovered it was a feature on Jill Freedman, whose name I immediately remembered (she had been nice enough, a few years ago, to reply to an email I had sent her complimenting her book of Ireland photographs, and one picture in particular in it, that gripped me at the time). After going through that story, slideshow and video I was somewhat distracted by the headline with Weegee's name in it. I know, I realize I shouldn't take the headline so literally as to infer she's the second coming of Weegee (or that she used his glass). And I suppose a comparison of some of Freedman's pictures to Weegee's is apt. But looking at her work as a whole, Weegee is definitely not the first photographer I think of. Granted, the article also mentions the influences of André Kertész and Diane Arbus. But Freedman's New York pictures in particular are much different, much more "35mm," much more wide angle, much more subtle and nuanced than Weegee's 4x5 in-your-face flashbulb. Personally, I would align her work more beside that of Bruce Davidson, Leonard Freed, Richard Kalvar and a few others. In the article there's a mention of how, at the time, her style "fell out of fashion," which I found disheartening. Freedman says "As far as work, you have to be good at hustling. I've just never been good at that." That made me laugh. In the end, I was happy the Times had given her some exposure. I enjoyed learning that's she's back in New York (and healthy). In the video she alludes to an upcoming book of her New York photographs from the 60s through the 80s. That should be excellent.

AIPAD

noreply@blogger.com (Cary Conover) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:56:00 +0000

This past Sunday I decided, somewhat last minute (and with definite encouragement from Yvonne), to go up to the Park Avenue Armory and check out the last few hours of the AIPAD show. AIPAD stands for the Association of International Photography Art Dealers. As the name suggests, it's basically a big gathering of many of the world's top photography galleries. Imagine an indoor sports arena filled with about 80 exhibitor booths, all immaculately decorated with gorgeous photographs of every genre imaginable. My only reluctance in going at all was that I would have to fork over $25 for admission and only get three hours out of it. It turns out that even just a couple hours of taking in so much photography is pretty exhausting.

I would divide the whole show into roughly three kinds of photography. First, and probably of the least interest to me considering my limited amount of time to see everything, were the exhibitors who showed primarily old photography: daguerreotypes, tintypes, glass plate negatives and things of that nature. Wanting to take a quick pass through everything and then go slower on my second walk-through, I pretty much just walked right by these without stopping in to look. The second group I really don't know how else to describe other than just "plain ol' contemporary photography." A lot this stuff was montage/landscape and also there was a lot of portraiture. Most everything seemed to have some sort of conceptual feel to it. All of it was printed very large and in most cases I could get a good look from the main walkway areas. Nearly all of this work was color.

Lastly, and by far of the greatest importance to me, I'll just describe as "20th Century Silver Gelatin." We're talking--and this is so totally in addition to all the "big" names--Faurer, Levitt, Croner, Grossman, Heath, Stettner, Ronis, and so many others. My favorite of all these was the gut-wrenching and iconic Bourke-White that I spent an entire minute looking at in an attempt to recall who shot it (NOT Evans or Shahn) before giving up to look at the title card. Needless, there was very little in this third group of photography that I hadn't seen before.

There was a photographer I came across whose name was only vaguely familiar: Paul Himmel. The booth for Keith de Lellis gallery had a gigantic print of his that I immediately fell in love with (at right, snapped with my cellphone camera). The print was huge, maybe five feet across, and there was just something dreamlike about the image, of a man standing on the Brooklyn Bridge. There was something about it that evoked memories of some 1940s New York movie I've heard of but never seen. The more I looked at it, the more I felt off-balance, almost dizzy. My eyes kept moving from the railing, to the bridge cables, to the buildings, to the direction of the sunlight. But my bearings on the image simply weren't snapping into place. The towers of 70 Pine and 40 Wall Street looked correct (though I must admit I can never remember which one is closer to the water; they're close enough to one another as it is, such that their east/west orientation kind of changes based on what angle they're being viewed from). It was the vantage from the bridge that was throwing me off. It was as if the image was made from some different bridge that connected to Manhattan much further down, via Broad or Whitehall Streets. Or if you didn't know any better it could have been made from the deck of a huge steamliner about to go up the East River.

I went up to the woman working the booth and asked "Is this photo flipped?" She didn't immediately know, and I started asking others nearby but nobody seemed to care. I took a quick snapshot with my phone and went to the next booth. Anybody curious enough to know what it looks like flipped back to normal can click here. Coincidentally, I have a widelux picture taken from just a few feet away, in 2000 or so, that I've posted here. FYI, Keith de Lellis is going to have a killer show of vintage Italian street photograpy starting next week, April 24th.

In all my dealings with people at the show I probably talked to maybe a dozen people. I had a great chat with Vicki Harris from Laurence Miller, who seemed delighted by my previous post about Fred Herzog. I spoke with Paul Berlanga and Stephen Daiter of Daiter's gallery in Chicago, which is where I bought my copy of "The Decisive Moment" ten years ago (that's a very interesting story, some other post). I spoke with Terry Etherton, who had lots of interesting things to say when I asked him about the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tuscon. He gave me a great poster promoting his gallery's publication of a limited edition print portfolio of John Loengard's "Celebrating the Negative" series.

Lots of other tidbits from my two-plus hours at the armory, not all of which is worth getting into. Afterwards I decided to take a little walk eastward on 65th Street toward the M15 bus on Second. Finally on board and able to give my feet a rest, I opened the AIPAD catalog, which until that point I had been using only to mark pages with business cards I had collected. It was nice to soak in everything and a good time to review my notes. Most of all, however, I was touched to discover an opening welcome message from the Museum of Modern Art's Chief Curator of Photography, Peter Galassi, titled "Saluting John Szarkowski." Accompanying it was a 1975 photo taken by Lee Friedlander, of Garry Winogrand photographing Szarkowski, just around the corner from MoMA.