H is for Head

And for headstones and for heads on a stone. St. Mary Star of the Sea, a cemetery alongside the railroad tracks in Lawrence, NY. Somewhere there a statue lost its head, which has taken temporary refuge in the carved flowers of a granite marker on this foggy day.

A lot of lesser-quality statuary seems to have been sold back in the late nineteenth- through early twentieth centuries, from the look of those graveyards today, with their one-armed cherubs and faceless, wing-clipped angels.

G is for Geese

April 4, 2009

Geese in graveyards. A goose walking over your grave. That feeling when a dark chill runs down your spine in an otherwise warm place. I learned as a child that when that happens, or when some other eerie event had occurred, it meant that 'a goose had walked over my grave'. A great visual to impress on the adolescent mind: that my grave exists somewhere, and every time I get a chill there's some filthy waterfowl squawking and dropping green turds all over it.

F is for Flatiron

November 1989

Thanksgiving 1989, the second year I went to the parade, was overcast but not too cold. There was snow on the ground from a day or two before, making the streets and sidewalks dark and slick. I was shooting the balloons from Herald Square that year; I was using two cameras-one with color film, and one with black and white. Since I was able to look up Broadway, from behind all the television trucks, I could see the line-up long before they got near 34th street, where they'd emerge from the shadows of the midtown canyon and turn right towards Seventh Avenue and their eventual deflation. I wanted to shoot them just before the turn.

There were only a couple of balloons that year I was interested in, and they were spaced almost a half an hour apart, so I spent a bit of time wandering the mostly deserted blocks below Herald Square. It was nice having so much of Manhattan to myself, so I came all the way down here to 23rd street and worked my way through most of a roll on each camera.

This is probably my favorite of all my images of the Flatiron Building. It's got a timeless feel to it, and if the cab weren't there it would be difficult to place the decade.

E is for Elevation

June 11, 2008

One thousand, one hundred and twenty-two feet above the Rogers Centre in Toronto, waiting for the Blue Jays game to start. This would eventually grow to a crowd of 35,000 people, but at at quarter to twelve most folks were just milling about and lolling in their seats.

The Jays would lose that game, to the Mariners, 2-1, after a close ninth inning. I wasn't planning on watching it from the open-air observation deck of the CN Tower, anyway. It's pretty windy up there, and you don't have any real view of the field as you can see, either. I shot this leaning over the railing with my lens right up against the wire mesh of the observation deck. The mesh is visible as a shadow running through the left third of the image, and to a lesser extent the right side, too. It was smaller than a standard chain-link, which is easier to shoot through. There wasn't any way for me to work around it with the lens I was carrying, a 24-105, which I was shooting at the long end. There's a glass floor on the lower deck where you can see the playing field, but there's part of the tower leg visible, and the floor is usually covered with kids and spilled soda. Still, with this I like the lines and curves of the streets and building.

D is for Duck

We see here one of the occupational hazards of being a sports photographer, namely, becoming part of the action.

I was on the baseline, under the net, waiting for the team I was shooting to complete a drive to the basket. They got there, made their shot, missed, and all I saw through the viewfinder was a whole bunch of teenage girls charging at me. While this could be disturbing on many levels, I realized they were just after the ball, which I sensed, rather than saw. I heard the ball bounce, and in a single movement managed to snap the shutter as I rolled backward into the wall.

The ball was out of bounds, the whistle blew, and a referee asked if I was okay. At this point I was sitting with my back against the wall, reviewing my shots. I nodded an assent, then showed him this picture, mentioning that "...this is why I can't get any decent insurance."

C is for Child's

January, 2009

The former Child's Restaurant on the boardwalk in Coney Island is an official New York City landmark with gorgeous terra-cotta ornamentation. Last summer the interior was being used as a skating rink; I don't know if that will be the case this summer, but then, who knows what the situation at Coney will be this summer. Astroland won't be reopening, though the Wonder Wheel in Deno's Amusement Park and the Cyclone will operate as usual.

This was taken this past January; I can only assume the shirtless man in shorts jogging by is an off-duty Polar Bear, since they swim in the ocean every week in the wintertime, not just on New Year's Day.

B is for Betsy...

October, 2005

...in a box, with brown paper. Our enigmatic little gray girl goes through phases that make her impossible to figure out sometimes. For some reason she took a liking to this box back in October of 2005, a box that Canon used to ship my camera back after a minor repair. Every time I went downstairs she'd follow me, then spend about ten minutes settling herself, or rather, letting herself settle, since the box was about one size smaller than she.

For about two weeks after it appeared I'd hear the crinkling and fussing as she climbed in whenever she was down in my office, then just as quickly one day she decided she'd rather keep an eye on me from her more usual, and closer perspective: sitting in my lap.

A is for Abandonment

December 28, 2008

Not unlike the way I abandoned this blog for a month, here is the first of twenty-six pictures for the following month.

Nissoquogue River State Park in Kings Park, Long Island, is made up of some of the acreage of the Kings Park hospital that I'm an all-too frequent visitor to. These were some of the staff housing, located on the eastern section of the property. According to Google Maps, these houses are located on Sea View Court, although views of the sea (or the Sound) are nonexistent.

If you click on that link, these two buildings are the ones below and to the right of the marker. Though decrepit and boarded-up, being a part of the state park means the trees and bushes are trimmed back, unlike the other sections of the hospital that are destined for (eventual) commercial and residential development, where nature has overtaken.

A to Z - No Fooling

I've let the blog go fallow for all of the last month, I know, through a combination of lethargy and busyness, if you can believe such a combination exists. I just haven't been shooting that much stuff for myself, and haven't felt overly inspired by what I find in my archives. And I've been shooting school stuff five to six days a week as well.

But I've decided to take some inspiration from another website, a photography message board actually, that I've been part of for several years now.

One of the occasional threads there is called 'Photographs: A to Z'. Currently in its fourth incarnation, members post images that relate to the alphabet in order. I thought this might be an interesting challenge for me to do here at the blog, one letter, one picture, every day this month.

So, starting tomorrow, be sure to check in every day to see what I come up with. It may be fun, or it may be boring. Who knows? We'll see.

Wall Read

I really don't mind graffiti so much, it's that so much of it is just meaningless scrawl that you have to wonder when the point went from individual expression to simply doing damage. I do find it interesting when you can see actual words and phrases forming among the scribbles, like protoplasm crawling from the sea.

This scene from the meat-packing district in May of 1989 is a good example of recognizable chatter rising above the din, although much of the noisy writing could be construed as stylized lettering. I'm not sure what agenda the author is pushing, but he is obviously challenging the reader with the exhortations of daring to be more, along with calls to be prepared. Then dismissing everyone with a cavalier "Next!"

I came across this doorway in Soho in August of 1994. What caught my eye was the fundamentalist phrase among the semi-legible scrawl, a voice from scripture that seemed to be speaking directly to the vandals as they worked. 'Repent or Burn in Hell'. Doesn't seem to have worked.

This is the corner of Greenwich and Desbrosses Street on the lower west side of Manhattan. It was a late summer afternoon, probably closer to early evening that June day in 1986. The shadows were long, and I was attracted to the way they fell on the sidewalks and filled the door pockets and ornamentation of the building. I liked the stark contrast of the picture, the dominating verticals of the building column, the hydrant and the sidewalk slabs. The buildings on the left lead the eye to the center of the picture, with the soft arching of the cars forming an abbreviated vanishing point. I was also intrigued by the two disparate lines of writing at the base of the column: the left-slanting 'Scribe' and the right-leaning 'Missing 1908'.






Finally, from November of 1989 we have the steps of a building somewhere near the Metropolitan Life building on Madison Square. Although I don't know what building it is, thanks to the internet I can tell you what the simple graffiti means.

Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, at the time of this picture, was a revolutionary guerrilla organization engaged in the civil war in El Salvador. It is currently a legal political party there. Here, their monogram either adds to the majesty of the statue, or signals the beginnings of the neighborhood's downward slide. Take your pick.