I dashed up to the Walker Evans show at the UBS gallery in Midtown just before heading back to Amsterdam. I had just read a review by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times and was extremely curious to see the new digitally made inkjet prints of familiar Evans images. I was a bit skeptical […]

Suzanne Vega, New York, 1980 (35mm film) I moved to New York in 1977 primarily to study photography at Cooper Union, but I was also a serious songwriter–albeit a beginner–and I quickly found a group of like-minded writers who were meeting weekly to share their latest compositions. It was at one of those meetings at […]

Ludlow Street (4×5 film) For all the new enthusiasm for modern architecture evident around town, this is still a city full of dismal brick boxes with small catalogue-ordered windows. A few years ago this one went up on Ludlow and Stanton on the Lower East Side where I am now taking photographs. Gradually, this cheap […]

Since the heat wave of two or three weeks ago, the weather has been mostly beautiful in New York. On one particularly fine day I took a stroll with my family along the Hudson River Park. We walked from City Hall past the WTC site, the newly completed 7 WTC, and the Barclay-Vesey Building on […]

Houston and Ludlow Streets Returned to New York on Friday, and on Saturday got out with the view camera to hit a few spots on the Lower East Side. I had previously noted the view looking toward Katz’s Deli on Houston and Ludlow. Three buildings are going up in close proximity, one occupying a former […]

Abraham Lincoln by Sarah Fisher Ames, 1868 Although I liked Greta Pratt’s Lincolns at MASS MoCA–like Elvis impersonators at an Elvis convention–I was happy to see Sarah Fisher Ames’s bust of Lincoln from 1868. Ames’s Lincoln, while idealized, is familiar, human, and there seems something wry and knowing about his expression. The artist clearly views […]

18 Lincolns, MASS MoCA by Greta Pratt(no photos allowed in galleries) The museum is an impressive adaptation of a factory complex along the Hoosic River containing large spaces with 19th century wood beams and columns. Large spaces dictate outsized art, or at least that’s the way most curators approach things. Which means, generally, installation art. […]

We left New York for a week in the Berkshires, the mountains in western Massachusetts. Drove up, via the Taconic Parkway, we are staying at The Porches, a hotel in North Adams across the street from MassMoca, the factory turned modern museum. The Porches is comprised of a row of former workers housing. The Porches […]