central park.
Everyone loves this spot in Central Park, right above Wollman Rink (I refuse to add the Trump bit to the title), where the view opens up to the buildings surrounding southeastern corner of the park. I love the spot too, but I clearly love watching other people love the spot. I’ve mentioned this spot before, and have posted the top photo before, but I’m including it here along with the photo above, because it shows the incredibly lovely seasonality of the city. Taken barely a month apart but at nearly the same time of day, the top on an overcast day in early March and the one above taken yesterday, a beautiful April Saturday, there’s a great sense of the promise of spring, even if we’re a bit overdue.
on ruins (1).
[Red Hook, April 2007, taken with the pinhole camera]
Low Readership Fridays! I’ve been mulling over some questions for a few months now re: what constitutes a ruin. And since, based on my site stats, it appears that everyone is elsewhere, I figure I’d take advantage of the relative quiet on the blog to mull out loud:
– Are ruins spaces that no longer serve their original purpose, with no hope for repurposing within their original confines (that is, architectural footprint or structural parameters)?
– If something that was a ruin then gets rebuilt as something else, what becomes of that ruinous state? In that case, “ruin” is something of an inbetween space: The building was in ruins before it got rebuilt as condos.
– So then: does “ruin” define/delineate an edifice or a situation? Put differently: is a ruin a thing or is it a condition, a state of being?
Of course, on some level, it doesn’t really matter; maybe you know a ruin when you see it. But I’m just trying to flesh out the kind of ruins that move me, the ones that make me cock my head and wonder about the state of the city, or what it means to be a city (or a nation, for that matter). Or, I suppose, how a city/nation defines itself by the ruins it maintains — and so, if we think about ruins not as particular buildings or spaces, but as a state of being, can we then think about the sorts of calculus involved in city/nation-identity? What kinds and levels of decay are permissible — and perhaps necessary — in considering urban growth? And what do we want that ideal decay to look like?
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from the archives: medium format gents.
Photos taken with Pony, my Yashica Mat 124. From the top:
1. Asad | Nolita
2. Florian | Berlin
3. Daniel | Williamsburg
4. Matt | East Village
It’s been an insane week at work, and the weather hasn’t been cooperating here in the city, so it’s a slow new-photo week for me. Seeing these older photos, though, reminds me that I need to take Pony out more. I’ve also been wandering around Flickr and getting some inspiration (read: envy) from other folks’ medium format shots, which basically means that despite only recently just getting Eleanor the Leica, my cameralust continues. Anybody got a Hasselblad they’d like to loan/sell? Ahem.
what i didn’t do this weekend.
I’d planned to go into the office, clock in a few overtime hours, add some funds to the whiskey kitty. That totally didn’t happen.
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I’ve been working on a couple of writing projects, so my ability to convey complex thoughts here on the blog has been severely diminished. Hopefully the photos will suffice for now.
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the tipsy shooter.
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I focus remarkably well while intoxicated.
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the backdrop project, round one.
So here it is — the first round of photos from my new little backdrop project. The project title is temporary, I think; I just haven’t had a chance to think it through quite yet — and I figure that as the project progresses, my understanding of it will as well, so a proper name will come to me eventually. But anyhow, here it is, in all of its nascent glory.
I also don’t know yet if I’ll use both gates/walls and more landscape-y backdrops (like the one of Daisy, second from the top). Thoughts? I’m also hoping to start asking more random folks on the street if they’d like to take part; I can only take so many photos of my friends’ backs before they start tiring of me and the camera. Thanks much to Ben, Daisy, Shannon, and Kathryn for obliging me and Eleanor these past few days.
And here’s an outtake of sorts — Ben and I were shooting away when a little boy came running towards (and then past) us. Ben looked over to see what the commotion was all about.
Any thoughts/suggestions/etc would be most welcome.
late afternoon, marshall stack.
Finally caught some magic hour light this week at Marshall Stack, while working on the for-now titled Backdrop Project. (More on that next week.) Shenanigans, as always — hard not to shenanigate when there’s a great $4 happy hour wine special, and great company to imbibe with. But I was quite pleased with how well the Ektar 100/ Zeiss Biogon/Leica combination is working under these fading light conditions — especially indoors. It helps, of course, that the Stack gets great light, and its dark grey-green walls seem to diffuse, perhaps even mute, the shadows, in really subtle ways. But by 7:15 everything had taken on a dusky, dim, steel blue hue as night slowly crept through the wall of windows along the eastern side of the bar, and it came time to put Eleanor away for the evening.
And yes, I very consciously inserted myself into that one photograph. A regular Alfred Hitchcock, I am. (Not at all, actually.)
from the archives.
Gesundheit!
Taken with the old Pentax K-1000 in Omaha, Nebraska, summer 1996. I was taking a lot of photos that summer after college, but I really wish I had the time to take another cross-country roadtrip now, with my now-myriad cameras in tow. So much landscape and light that I’d love to see again, and perhaps to capture differently this time around.
a new project.
So at least one photo turned out sort of nicely from this weekend’s weirdly botched Elitechrome roll: here’s lovely Shannon, obliging me in an intentionally back-facing photograph by the building next to Marshall Stack on Sunday afternoon. I like how subtle vertical greys in her hoodie contrast with the horizontal greys of the building gates. And the sliver of her yellow bag adds a nice, wee bit of color to the shot.
Then, once I stopped thinking about the color and tones and just stared at the photo a bit longer, I realized that I maybe have a thing for this kind of photograph. To wit — Daniel, several months ago:
12 years ago:
15 years ago:
To be sure, the last two (of my old friend Theron) don’t actually include the head (sorry about that, TS!), so it’s sort of a different beast. But not completely. You get the point, no? Not quite a pattern, certainly not a fetish, but perhaps just a …. well, a thing. One that maybe I should bring more focus to.
And so with a new camera (Hi, Eleanor!) and the start of spring and nearly decent weather (though you wouldn’t know it by staring out at the rain and snow currently washing out the weekend’s sunny bliss), I’ve got a wee new project on my hands. Or a project on other people’s backs, as it were. Stay tuned.
Update: This one too, of Lupe, from two years ago.
el is for leica.
So here she is, properly christened: Eleanor, my sweet little Leica.
Over brunch at Maialino on Saturday, Mark suggested Eleanor as a potential name for the new camera. And not only did it seem like a good fit, but we realized that it had the added, built-in bonus of having El as a nickname. As in, Oh, I’m taking The El with me today. L El is for Leica, indeed!
When I told my friend Dan that the Leica finally had a name, he wrote to inform me that Eleanor was the name Nicholas Cage gave to the one car he couldn’t steal in The Fast and the Furious Gone in 60 Seconds. (Dan, by the way, is a film scholar who specializes in things pretty far removed from TFATF GI60S, so I’m not sure in what context he found himself watching that movie. Ahem.) Upon hearing this, Mark pointed out: That makes it even better! You have what Nicholas Cage never could. Heh. Super bonus!
It’s a shame, though, that Eleanor’s christening was marred by weird film issues. I don’t know if it was the Kodak Elitechrome 200 being wonky, or the metering being off as a result of the slide film, or if it’s my increasingly questionable negative scanner, but this roll came out with crazy purple tones, and with everything — minus the Maialino pics — underexposed and slightly unfocused. The focusing could’ve been me, I know, but the shots had a more overall fuzziness to it. Will try another round, this time with my usual Ektar, to make sure that there’s nothing funny going on with the lens or camera.
Two additional thoughts without a good place to put them:
In writing this post, I only just now realized that last weekend was the closing weekend for the Tara Donovan show at Pace Gallery, which we managed to catch, and which was pretty great and trippy, with hundreds of thousands of nickel-plated steel pins coming together to create shimmery abstract drawings of sorts.
Also, Mark says that the ricotta pancakes he had at Maialino on Saturday are possibly the best he’s ever had. He’s from the Midwest, so the boy knows from pancakes. The glass of Rosso Piceno I had with my bombolotti all’amatriciana was also pretty spectacular (as was my dish). Maialino is back on its game.
hong-an tran 