Hi Folks. I moved this black and white photography blog to:
Please feel free to visit if you’d like to see what I’ve been up to since this blog came to a halt. Why did I move? Well, I just wanted more freedom with a self-hosted photo blog.
Filed under photographs, The Photo Biz
Also infrared. I doubt whether the tower clock has ever been shot with infrared. It shows the wear and tear, and which parts are clean, which parts covered with New York grime. It’s hard to believe the detail in that clock. The face is formed with small mosaic tiles. Beyond the black dot circle, sea creatures and vines and grapes and shells, and then the larger strange creatures that look like someone has had a bad acid trip. Those were the days of barons and old boys that could afford to put up cathedrals to business.
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Filed under infrared
Infrared film with infrared flash at night.
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Filed under infrared
The Kosher deli on second avenue is manned by Mexican workers. I’ve been doing portraits of them when they come out for a break and sit on the stoop.
Filed under no category
Another shot I forgot about that I just added to the store. Title is from the book by Arthur Koestler. Still going through scanned negatives… I’m almost done. Maybe another 100 to look at. There’s about 212 in the store right now. That might not sound like a lot, given the thousands of shots I’ve taken, but it is. I want to stop it at 250 images. After that it’s almost like a small stock agency specializing in NYC.
Filed under photographs
And I really wonder what this building once was. (From the Bronx side of the Willis Avenue Bridge). It has a fancy portico, and looks like it was an government office building once-upon-a-time. It is clear that there should be “no ball playing” but doesn’t say anything about tagging.
Filed under photographs
Leather in the water by the curb after the big rain. Of course it never did look like that to the naked eye. It’s just the result of a very very fast shutter speed. I don’t know about you but I don’t see at 1/4000th of a second.
Filed under photographs
Photographer’s brain on a hot day with nothing better to do than photograph shadows and strange crushed cans that may have held wine at one time in the gutter and follow the instructions that were once on it: Twist to Open.
Filed under photographs
This is the weather I hate. 99% humidity. I barely go out, but stay inside bailing out the tray beneath my air-conditioner which still doesn’t drip out the window properly but rather wants to come into the house. But thank God the thing works, even if I do feel sometimes like I’m adrift in a leaking rowboat.
Anyway. Rain. And I left the house to take pictures of stuff in the gutter. This is the easiest sort of thing to do when you haven’t shot for a while. No meaning. Just design and texture.
Filed under photographs
From Les’ blog. I think Tom Waits would be perfect to record this.
Over the years, and I mean going back to when we shared an apartment in our 20′s, Andy and I wrote tons of songs, both on our own and together. Even a few years ago the urge resurfaced and we spent a lot of time working with a synth and drum machine and software to do the arrangements with. But somehow, compared to my photography endeavors, nothing ever happened with the songs.
I had a feeling with photography about how to get it seen, even early on when I first approached galleries. You could take a portfolio and make the rounds. And the photographs, the prints, they were finished products. You didn’t need much imagination to like or dislike them. Whereas in the age of singer/songwriter, it wasn’t that feasible to keep saying, “can you imagine this with so-and-so singing it. “
Maybe there was a way, but without putting together a band with singers and musicians, you couldn’t just say to people, listen to this song and let them use their imagination in terms of what could be done with a good singer and arranger. So that was the difference.
I think that if I had been able to perform my own music (I never had a pleasing voice, though I guess that didn’t stop some songwriters) but I also couldn’t get up in front of an audience and sing. It was always too scary for me and still would be.
So that’s another difference. As a photographer, you wander around and do your thing, but you aren’t a performer, and you don’t need to produce much more than a bunch of good prints. To make it as a songwriter today — that seems to require more than just an ability to write songs.
Filed under memoirs
They do often go the wrong way, and I know two people who were hit and sent to the hospital. Nevertheless, still a good night subject for yours truly. This was shot by panning with the bike as it went by. On the other hand, I once read that the most dangerous job in NYC was bike messenger. I always thought they’d make a good subject for a documentary. The only film I know about them was with Kevin Bacon (Quicksilver) which not only features Kevin Bacon (not your typical bike messenger) but takes place in San Francisco and was an awful movie.
I almost became a bike messenger at one point in my life when I couldn’t think of anything else to do and was out of money (I was about 22) but was talked out of it by an uncle who got me a job as a can carrier in a film processing lab. (There’s a Jerry Lewis film about that). It was a very simple job, but like Jerry Lewis I didn’t fare well at it. I would be given a stack of big pancake like silver cans to bring from one place to another through dark underground tunnels. I spoiled some film one day when I tripped and one of the cans opened. That didn’t get me fired because it was a union job and my uncle knew the head of the local.
After a week or so, my eyes got used to the dark tunnels and I was able to make my way around with the teetering stacks of film cans, but then I opened a door to a processing room that had a flashing red light which I didn’t see since the cans were stacked so high, and that got me sent to the union leaders office which was a gigantic office. You opened the door and had to travel a few miles to get to the guys desk. And sitting behind the desk was the biggest guy (outside of a circus) I had ever seen in a suit that was bursting at the seams chatting on the phone. He just looked up at me finally still talking into the phone and beckoned with big beefy hands to me: Hey kid, you had betta watch your step. If not for your uncle you’d be outa here.
Yes sir.
And then he went back to his phone conversation.
What I remember most about the job was the dispatcher who was a a fat ugly woman who cursed like a sailor and tried to pinch me every time I walked by her desk, which was often and I was always with the cans. A million years later in another life I remember her name (Rita) and her eyes which had turned into mole eyes after decades in the dark. The jobs some people had there. The big job was to check that the colors were right in film reproductions. There was a room with several projectors that were playing movies and t.v. shows upside down, hour after hour.
During the week I was there, they had a big order to make copies of the show Bonanza for the Japanese market, and for nearly a week there were eight guys in a big room (they all smoked), each watching upside down episodes of Bonanza with Japanese subtitles (also upside down) and the sound off looking for color errors in the prints. Can you imagine that? Like some sort of torture.
I can’t imagine I was there for more than a few weeks, but can’t remember whether I was eventually fired or left. Probably the latter. Yes, I left because I remember Rita making fun of me for quitting. From there I got my job as a busboy at the City Squire Hotel. That’s another story that has nothing to do with bike messengers, though it still involved carrying large amounts of flat circular objects from one spot to another.
What I remember from that job was that the short order cook was usually drunk, and although he never knew who the plates were going to, he would randomly spit in the food. But that’s a story for another day.
Filed under OBSERVATIONS, photographs
