monumental brooklyn.

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Way back in the mid-aughts, I filed a dissertation that relied heavily on the works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an Italian architect whose etchings of the rediscovery of ancient Roman ruins depicted a world in which men were dwarfed by the monumental structures around them.  (This was only part of the dissertation; for more, go here, and STOP CRINGING ALREADY.)

On Friday afternoon, en route to meeting some old friends in Brooklyn Bridge Park, down near Dumbo and the Manhattan Bridge, I stumbled upon a family hanging out on the rocks by the water’s edge.  In color — aka Real Life — the scene was sort of sweetly mundane, with the afternoon sun casting a warm glow over the water and the park, and Manhattan in the distance across the river.  In black and white, however (I’d forgotten that I still had b&w film loaded in the Hasselblad), the photo takes on a bit more of that Piranesian quality: darker, even a bit ominous, slightly out of its city-specific context, with everyone appearing tiny against the backdrop of the bridge looming large and grey.

A bit of inadvertent Piranesi.  Or perhaps the dissertation — itself a beast of a thing that nearly consumed me — still looms large in my photographic imagination.
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