Shot a mini-documentary this week, near Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building. It will be a long while before I get to putting it together, but it was a good time. Details sooner or later.
Above: an iPhone snapshot of the Chrysler Building, taken after a quick visit to 99-Cent Pizza.
Lone plant on a rooftop, more than 24 stories up. Nature is good at its job.
On Sunday, while I was indefatigably practicing a bit of street shooting, walking from Midtown to the Upper East Side, I couldn't help but notice how overwhelmingly saturated the street is with cameras.
Cell phones, sure: dozens of people locked in a zombielike shuffle, phone jammed against temple, swerving in front of me at intervals. But cameras: everywhere. At the same time, little of it could be called street photography, really. It's just not what people do.
Above: near Bryant Park.
Those little teensy dots on top of the roof with the Tudor City sign? They're having a photo shoot. I kept seeing a flash but had to grab my pocket camera and zoom in before I could tell what was going on.
On Tuesday, I had to go to a midtown meeting about some upcoming projects, but luckily was finished early. So I wandered over to Bryant Park, got an endive, pear and gorgonzola salad, ate in the sun, and found out the Frugal Traveler won a Webby.
A rainy Saturday night involved a visit to the The Library Hotel's Bookmarks Lounge at Madison and 41st. Always a pleasant stop, but since they close at midnight, if you intend to continue the literary theme you'll need to find your way to The Dead Poet.
Tomorrow, the International Documentary Challenge begins. Last year, we made it to the finals, and won an award (though not the Grand Prize). So we're back, and hoping to do better. At 8 a.m., they'll email us our possible genre choices, and we'll decide on what film to make, and then we'll make it.
By Monday.
I'm ready to go. I'm like a kid in a candy store.
Above: a candy store, earlier tonight.
I watched "Tina Barney: Social Studies" on Sundance last night (there's an excerpt here) and was reminded that the work and the artist are two very separate things, despite our natural efforts to put them together.
Here's a film that takes the strategy of looking into Tina Barney's life and work process as if her biography will explain her art, as so many documentaries on photographers do -- yet in the end, if we're willing to read between the lines, it's clear that the artist, the audience, and the art are not in agreement about what's revealed.
Barney claims she's documenting upper class families, her subjects feel she's revealing their charm, magazines think she's creating images to envy, and galleries think she's making work about class. Perhaps art functions like those "selfish gene" theories -- it's not about the host, but about propagating the art into the future.
The score so far: Biography, 0; Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1.
Above: 43rd Street, looking toward the U.N.
Ah, Valentine's Day. It's a made-up holiday, you know.
Above: People bidding on roses on their way home, near Grand Central Terminal.
This is the 301st post on this blog. I'm rethinking it a bit, so don't be surprised if a there's a redesign soon.
Of course, it's fair to say that Photography itself needs a bit of a redesign. If you stare at something long enough, ideas should begin to form on what it's for and what it might do.
That tiny black speck on the roof, one-third from the top of the photograph? That's a woman's shoe.
There are some cigarette butts near it. Probably a grand story also, but I'm afraid I don't know it. Or I'd share it with you.
The photo of Friday's rainstorm was taken at 6:34 p.m.
The photograph above was made about 45 minutes earlier.
Since I shot this on film previously, as I was walking in to work today I pulled out my pocket camera and made the shot above.
Monday proved to be an interesting day, with stops in the Upper East Side, The Bronx, and Midtown. Cameras are omnipresent in New York, of course, but it's in Midtown that you see people walk to a corner, put a pocket camera in front of their face, and lean back to take in all of a famous building. Foot traffic flows around them, they carefully compose the shot, wait, wait, and finally take the shot.
At one of my gigs I'm near the Chrysler building, so you see this throughout the day. Go another block over and you see it around the front of Grand Central Terminal. And a few blocks further and it's the main sport in Times Square.
