Black and White Photography Blog, Vol. I

Last night I discover a man, maybe he’s in his 70’s, maybe he’s 80 - doing Taekwondo by the East River. After a quick introduction, we get to talking, or rather he gets to talking. He is happy to demonstrate Taekwondo but more than that - he is like a lot of the old people I meet - or maybe it’s all people I meet - he claims to know all secrets of the human heart, as well as the human brain. He has the answer to all of the world’s problems.

He is French. His name is Jean-Paul. And he is on his seventh trip around the world.

I believe him. Of course, I believe just about anyone. And then he rattles on for about a half hour while I click some portraits of him. He finally concludes with the wizard-like pronouncement that Americans are spoiled, that we are terrorists, and that what this country needs is a good military government.

He claims that the military should rule here. He also pronounces that everyone that is running this country - most countries for that matter - are only after one thing: power.

So there something in his speech for everyone. After a while, I get bored, shake his hand and go on my way to reshoot some of my river stuff.

I wonder why people must pretend to know everything. Why everyone’s aunt and uncle can give you advice on any subject at all. Sometimes, my aunt Fay discusses the pros and cons of various types of brain surgery. But if you ask her where her coat is - she doesn’t know.

As I walk off - Jean Paul declaims that we will meet again. Surely we will, I reply. And yes, I’ll have a print for him the next time we meet.

But I can’t help but wonder where he’s bound. Will he be practicing Taekwondo on the streets of Paris next. He says he hasn’t been back to his own country in years - and maybe it’s time to return.

Why is it so hard to live in doubt; to live without knowing what it’s all about? Without having opinions about subjects we know nothing about?

Last night, our Governor, who was elected as a white horse candidate, as a man who would ride into town and clean things up in the state’s capital was accused of having used an expensive Washington prostitute. So now you ask people - how can such a thing be? How can a reform candidate step so far over the line?

And watch the answers: power corrupts. All politicians are phonys. It was a frame-up by the opposition. And I’m sure many other opinions. But it is just so difficult to understand without walking in this guys shoes. He will be the topic for late-night comedians for at least two weeks. And don’t get me wrong - I’m as shocked and amused as anyone - but this guy was elected overwhelmingly. The one thing that was never in doubt was his character.

Like I say, from here on in, ask me anything of a non-factual nature, and I’m just going to shake my head and say: sorry, I don’t know. If you need advise, go ask Jean-Paul.

86th & Lexington. Do you think there are more homeless people in wealthy neighborhoods. When I do my Bronx shooting, it’s rare to see a homeless person. Poor people, yes. But not out panhandling.

That’s the way it’s been all day. As noted previously, my favorite weather for shooting; this or snow. Now that spring is almost here, I’ll be in trouble like I was last year - though last year I ended up doing a lot of infrared during the spring and summer and that helped me.

As you can see, I’ve stopped tagging this stuff with 40D / Sigma 30 etc. If I do something new and different I’ll tag it.

I did come up with a nice rain contraption today. I screwed the camera onto a monopod, taped an umbrella to the monopod at a good height for the 30mm, and had a very comfortable rig for shooting in even the worst rain (which is what we had today). Nice and sturdy and I could keep both hands on the camera, i.e. I didn’t need to have a hand to hold the umbrella. Something I should have thought of before.

The rain speeds up things - people dashing across the street - and also slows some of us down, this guy waiting under scafolding. He had a backpack, and one piece of luggage, and spoke in what I think was Italian. Mostly. He kept pointing at my camera and mentioning, channel 13. I couldn’t piece it all together. I think he was saying that his son was working for channel 13, and was in charge of producing a show about Italy.

No, I didn’t smell wine on his breath. I wonder whether he was a sort of lost Howard Hughes type, wandering around the city pretending to be homeless, but was in fact a secretly wealthy Italian with a son who worked for channel 13.

At any rate, this falls under the category of a street portrait in that I spent some time listening to his stories until he started to make a fist at the passersby, and seemed to go off on some wild tangent about television signals. At that point, I said, ciao - going along with the Italian thing - and he raised his knuckles at me and grinned like a madman, saying - ciao bambino. Ciao!

Excuse me, I’m on my way to play in the Three Penny Opera.

Brent asked how I decide what to put in the store? A few things:

I need to print it at a decent size first (I want to make sure I know how it will stand up in case someone orders it at 12 x 18). From that I can also tell how it will print at 24 x 36 or so.

And I want the print to have been hanging around for a little while, so I have some objectivity about it. I sometimes ask myself - is there anything here that says New York? This is not critical - but it is a factor in terms of posting it in the store. So many of the images that blog readers like are not sellable. At least not by me.

If someday I became wildly famous - and that is unlikely as there are only a couple of famous photographers in the history of photography - but then these shots would sell. I’m happy for now to put them in the blog, once in a while just for fun I’ll put them in the store - and once in a while I’ll be proven wrong - but not that often.

So how do I decide? I put my sales hat on, and picture myself sitting either in an office cube somewhere in Minnesota, or a living room in Key West. Or maybe a farmhouse in Iowa. I try to put myself into the head of the usual buyer (a woman for sure), or someone looking for a special gift; and with all that in mind, I can get close to what people are looking for. Remember, I’m now doing this nearly nine years.

Sometimes, I’ll let my own taste have it’s day - and put up something that I love - and mostly this is a mistake - in the commercial sense as it may take 9 years to sell one print. I kid you not. It’s happened a couple of times where I’d have a favorite up for a long time, then take it down, and maybe five years later someone asks me about it and does buy it. It doesn’t bother me. I’m happy to be able to get stuff that may be recognized at some later time - or maybe not at all. What do I care. I got the thrill when I saw the negative or the arrangement of bits.

See image above for an example. It is like an imaginary movie poster. I would hang it on my wall (if I had space) but I doubt if I could sell more than one or two small prints in a decade.

Spooky Turnstiles - a photographer might buy one, but it’s unlikely.

Girl tasting snow - that’s up for grabs. I’m not sure if that will sell or not.

But Snowman, Great Lawn - that will sell better than anything else I’ve done recently. (Don’t believe me - but - it’s true.) And look - when I wanted something pleasant to put on the top of this blog - what did I do? I took the top third of one of the snowman shots. I’m the same as everybody else and you probably are too.

No back story. Just a New York character being a New York character in my waiting New York frame.

Every neighborhood has it’s characters. I consider myself a neighborhood character, so there’s nothing derogitory about it. I neve have spoken with this woman, or her dog, but they are inseparable. I noticed after some study of the image, that her rainhat, if that’s what it is, has been tied up in the same way the dogs coat has been fastened. I believe, she has stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel.

Through the window of the local diner. I saw her pointing her camera at the window, and happened to be on my way out and pointed camera at her. Click. We met outside and chatted a bit, then I continued off in the rain.

The little girl started by waving at the three trumpet players behind me… (will post later) and then I started to make faces at her in the window; and hence this shot right before train pulled out.

Low ceilings, that’s all that attracted me. This is at the Times Square station (6th Avenue). Sometimes when I discover a new station, I’ll just stand around and daydream about what it must have been like to plan a station like this. How they feel like they were pulled from a German expressionist film like Metropolis or Modern Times. The technology gets newer - the cards get swiped faster - and yet the surroundings with their Modern efficiencies somehow make us less human; or if not less human, more machine like. You feed the machine; you become the machine. Too much? You feed the machine, you must at least dance with the machine. Oh these are the ramblings of the things aren’t like they used to be.

What is the change that we’re all supposed to be embracing now? Can things be changed in four years by one guy? Maybe. But aren’t we supposed to be afraid of change? We’re afraid of change, but we’re also afraid of the present course. Got to change the course. Not to something more modern, but to something more soothing. Something we’re comfortable with.

Let’s start by doing away with those cards you slide through the stile. After all, what is a more fitting symbol of change, of going back to the way things were, than an actual token? I can see the candidate in New York holding up the coin-shaped token and proclaiming that on his first day in the president’s office, he’ll bring back the subway token. This will give employment to token clerks again, and to the men and women who made tokens; who counted tokens; and who sometimes stole tokens.

The coffee series begins…

There’s a bunch of movies about the what can happen to the photographer who sees “too much.”

- Rear Window (the classic), though how he can reject Grace Kelly…

- Peeping Tom (Michael Powell) - this is a even darker than Rear Window

- Blow Up by Antonioni (sp?) That one is the most interesting because you’re really not sure, and he’s really not sure if he’s seen something or not. Talking about “grain,” vs. “noise” - Blow Up is the first movie about a Pixel Peeper.

Somewhere in the Times Square-ish part of the system.

Oh - and please - don’t complain about the new look of the blog because I’m re-working it. Give me a week and then feel free to tell me to go back to the way it was. There’s something in this way of organizing the posts that I like, but I’ll be damned if I know what that is.

There’s something pleasingly perverse about having a photo blog with no photos on the start page; though I need to make it easier to flip from one post to the next.

This is pretty close to what my previous world looked like, except for the window. Banks often have offices on the ground floor with windows. I suppose they pick someone to shuffle papers around so as to give the illusion that they have nothing to hide. This particular image was fascinating to work on; things that can’t be seen at this blog size such as a several cartons all labeled Number 12, and several Fedex packages that look like they need to be sent. Oh - I could write a story about this office - but I’ll save that for another time.

A blur sped by me. I turned, click - and she was gone.

Voices behind me:

Whats he doin’? I dunno. Takin’ a picture of sumthing. I know dat, but what of? I dunno. Oh I know what he’s doin’. What? He’s takin’ reflections. Dat’s what. Ya think? Yeah. Must me reflections he’s takin’ of dose people comin’ out wit dere coffee. Dat’s cool. Hey, mista. Is dat what ya takin’ pictures of? Dose reflections…

Of course I’m stooped on 2nd avenue, pretty much ground level, pointing the dslr gizmo at the puddle and just waiting for people to walk by and hoping for good ripples. My knees hurt after a while and without getting anything great, I stand up, smile at the three people who have been so filled with wonder behind me, and continue on what must seem a mysterious way.

* * * *

One thing about Lightroom. It definitely seems to be funky with large files. I know about the 10K pixel limit, and this was a bit short of that. 9500 pixels (more or less) on the long side. It didn’t preview correctly in the print module. In fact it just showed up as gray. It was a tiff, no layers. I closed Lightroom, and went into photoshop and printed it on the 7800 without a problem. It’s the first bug I’ve run into so far with LR. I suppose there are more that I just haven’t hit yet. That’s why software is numbered 1.x

A conversation with my sister’s friend that I met for the first time. She wanted to find out what sort of things I shot.

I told her: pretty much whatever is around me. I mentioned that sometimes I shot people on the street, sometimes statues in the park. She was listening to me when it struck her that I was photographing people, sometimes without their knowledge, who were complete strangers.

You know, we are in our own worlds sometimes and I’ve been photographing people with or without their awareness for so long that it just seems natural to me; the way an artist might see something, a face, or a table and pull out a sketch pad.

But the idea that I was photographing strangers shocked her and she wanted to know whether I thought it was right - morally right - to photograph people without asking for permission.

I didn’t have a good answer for that. I’m not sure that I ever thought about it. I was always too concerned with technique. How to do it.

Moral? I don’t know. There is a sense that you are doing something forbidden. There is no law against it. It is considered, part of artistic expression. But still - you are taking something - the person’s privacy - without their permission. You can get away with it, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

Here, I take the baby’s privacy. Is it wrong? I would argue that it is can be seen both ways, depending on the scope of your approach. Not to be cute - but are you looking at the big or small picture.

Small picture involves you and the subject. At this level, a transaction has taken place and it is hard to defend the photographer. Why should a person agree to have their likeness used, even if they are in a public place, to adorn a blog. Have they given their permission by taking the train. By walking the street? No. It’s not a big sin, but at this micro level - it’s not that easy to justify.

At another level, think of what you offer the world with these attempts at art. You can show what the world is like. You can show moments that are funny, that are tragic, that are uplifting. Who knows how you effect the world when you drop a pebble in the water. You don’t own the pebble. You swiped it from the beach owner. But you send a ripple that can meet another ripple and somewhere in the world change happens for the greater good.