West 29th Street — © Brian Rose
Without comment.
Archive for February, 2012
New York/Central Park
New York/Lower East Side
Inspiration, by Solon Borglum, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery
© Brian Rose
I’m awaiting a finished bound book of Time and Space on the Lower East Side for final approval. After that, I should have a pretty good idea when to expect delivery of books. In the meantime, I am pleased to announce that I will be doing a slide talk based on Time and Space on April 2 at the Duo Multicultural Arts Center on East 4th Street. I have wanted to do an event on that block of 4th Street, which is where the cover photograph was made, and where so much of my early New York history took place. Hopefully, I will have books for sale that evening. I’ll have more details in the near future. I am still working on a location for a book launch party. Stay tuned.
Also, I will again be teaching a class in ICPs continuing education program — Photographing New York: The Lower East Side. We will be make photographs of the neighborhood and then put them together as a book using Blurb, the online book creation and publishing platform. Go here to find out more and to register.
New York/Around Town
Tenth Avenue — © Brian Rose
Odds and ends. Things to recommend. Things to dis.
The New York Times reports this morning that the film On the Bowery will soon be available on DVD. I saw it last year for the first time at Film Forum, and wrote about it extensively in my blog here and here. Alan Rogosin’s film is an astonishing portrayal of lost New York and lost souls, controversial then and now for its hybrid documentary/fictional format. Actual denizens of the Bowery, picked out by Rogosin, played the lead roles filmed in the streets and bars of the Bowery near Houston Street. It’s one of the great realist films ever made, a tour de force of editing and photography. The montage of grizzled faces at the end is unforgettable.
Fifth Avenue — © Brian Rose
The Radical Camera at the Jewish Museum, one of the best museum photography shows in recent years, will be up through March 25th. This show is about the New York Photo League and its community of photographers who explored the streets of the city during the 1930s and 1940s. Their work pushed aesthetic boundaries and embraced political engagement. The show is worth seeing both for its vivid depiction of New York and for illuminating the development of documentary street photography leading up to the modern era. There are a number of familiar names in the exhibition, like Berenice Abbott and Aaron Siskind, but most are lesser knowns, many who have fallen through the cracks, and are typically not included in the dominant narrative of photographic history.
From the blog DLK Collection: For me, I finally started to visually understand the small steps that made up the aesthetic and conceptual changes that took place between the 1930s and the 1950s, those missing evolutionary links between Abbott and Frank; The Americans now seems to me less like a thunder strike of genius out of nowhere and more like an innovative, original extrapolation from visual ideas that were already beginning to percolate around. This excellent show tells a uniquely New York story, and is worth a visit simply for the rich historical details of life in the city that it provides. But the reason I found this to be one of the best photography shows of the year is that it also successfully fills in an important (and largely missing) gap in the recounting of the American photographic narrative. Not only do I now have an increased appreciation for the talents of the many members of the New York Photo League (many of whom have been unjustly overlooked), I now understand much more clearly how the larger artistic puzzle fits together.
Read the whole review here.
We think of serious photography now in the context of museums and galleries, but it wasn’t really until the Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art with its “we are the world” sentimentality that the medium began to find favor in elite institutions. The Photo League embraced work that depicted gritty reality whether on the streets of the Lower East Side or the beach at Coney Island–it did not celebrate the myth of American ascendency, and as a result, ran afoul of the anti-communist blacklisters of the early ’50s. The fact that many of its members were Jewish was also not coincidental.
Imagine. At the time of the Photo League, there was virtually no museums or art galleries that paid any attention to photography. In retrospect, it appears that the Photo League–its shows and its community of photographers–was central to the development of photography as social instrument and as an art form. And this story has not adequately been told until now. Do not miss this exhibition.
World Press winning photograph — © Samuel Aranda
There has already been lots written about this photograph, and I have no inclination to analyze something that’s not worth the effort. First of all, the premise of a grand prize for a single news photograph is wrong. The most interesting single photographs, in my opinion, are often the most open ended, often the least iconic, images that defy easy reading. That’s the opposite of what the World Press jurors usually come up with. They want a Muslim Mary cradling Jesus, or something.
This is a crappy photograph, maudlin, cliche.
New York/Kodak, R.I.P.
Kodak–I wrote with sadness a few weeks ago about the news that the company had filed for bankruptcy. Recently, the blogs have been featuring old Kodak Coloramas, the giant back-lit transparencies that were used to promote picture taking by the masses. Occasionally the images were impressive, but mostly they were kitschy, saccharine views of American life. We like them now–as parody–but even at the time they were unhip and projected an image of a company hopelessly out of step with a growing younger generation of amateur and erstwhile professional photographers. The writing was on the wall as early as the 1970s.
When I entered art school in 1977, Kodak was relevant to me primarily for their film, paper, and chemistry. By then, the Japanese had already cornered the serious camera market. Nikon, Canon, and a host of others were making beautifully designed SLRs and rangefinder 35mm cameras. My first camera was Nikkormat. Leica was still the premier street photographer’s camera, and although I couldn’t afford one, I did buy German-made lenses (Rodenstock and Schneider) when I got my first view camera. Kodak cameras were dumbed down gadgets for Mom and Dad who somehow always photographed you with a tree sticking out of your head.
Not that it mattered much–film was the core of Kodak’s business.
But even there, the company blew it spectacularly. Here’s how it went for me:
In the ’80s photographers began moving away from slide film, at that time dominated by Kodak, especially with their most famous brand Kodachrome. I began shooting negative film for making prints, and all my art projects were done that way. But my architectural clients wanted 4×5 transparencies, and the magazines, printed primarily in color, wanted the same.
In the mid or late 1980s 4×5 holders gave way to paper packets that did not require hand loading, which vanquished the dust problem that plagued sheet film. Fuji’s product had one sheet per packet and Kodak two. I typically shot six sheets of film for each image–two normals, and two at 1/2 stop under and over. The lab I used hated the 2-sheet Kodak packages because they had difficult time keeping track of the film, and I was strongly urged to use Fujifilm. Not only that, 2-sheet packs were more difficult to handle and more prone to accidents in the field, which would then spoil two images.
At some point I actually decided to track down someone at Kodak and explain to them how quickly they were losing New York professionals–a small number of people compared to the tens of thousands of wedding and portrait photographers around the world–but certainly their most prestigious and important group of customers. After being shunted from one department to another, I finally spoke to someone in Rochester involved in the manufacture of sheet film. He claimed that the 2-sheet packaging was what their customers wanted. He was friendly, but clearly did not understand the alarm I was raising. Way too late, a few years later, Kodak ditched the 2-sheet packaging.
One of the great challenges in shooting architectural interiors in those days was balancing different sources of light, and increasingly, fluorescent lighting was used in offices mixed with incandescents spots. Fluorescents, as you still see in older color pictures, came out an insipid green on film. Elaborate schemes involving multiple exposures, gelled fixtures, and filters, were used to achieve the desired natural look. As a result, architectural photographers comprised an elite priesthood performing small lighting miracles with their bag of tricks.
And then the final straw. I can’t pinpoint the year, but I believe it was in the early ’90s, Fujifilm introduced a negative film that came embedded with an extra layer designed to neutralize the green cast of fluorescents. This invention altered architectural photography immediately and permanently, and Kodak would have no answer for years. Virtually every interiors photographer abandoned Kodak for good.
From today’s Times:
Through the 1990s, Kodak spent some $4 billion developing the photo technology inside most of today’s cellphones and digital devices. But a reluctance to ease its heavy financial reliance on film allowed rivals like Canon and the Sony Corporation to rush into the fast-emerging digital arena. The immensely lucrative analog business Kodak worried about undermining was virtually erased in a decade by the filmless photography it had invented.
I just cringe reading this. They invented the technology of the future but utterly failed to create products that appealed to a new generation of customers. What an epic failure by one of America’s great companies.
Kodak considers home photo printers, high-speed commercial inkjet presses, workflow software and packaging to be the core of its future business. Since 2005, the company has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into new lines of inkjet printers. Once the digital camera business is phased out, Kodak said its consumer business would focus on printing.
Just in case anyone from Kodak is reading this, you’ve already lost this market to HP, Epson, and Canon. It’s over. The seeds of this failure go all the way back to those now beloved Coloramas. Kodak’s managers and marketers were lost in a rapidly vanishing American landscape–an imagineer’s Disneyland America–not the real world, not the changing world. Not the high tech world that Steve Jobs and other entrepreneurs here and abroad understood and so effectively exploited.
R.I.P. Kodak. (please keep making 4×5 negative film and c-print paper for me just a little longer)
New York/Lower Manhattan
Brooklyn Battery Tunnel entrance — © Brian Rose
David Dunlop in the New York Times City Room column this morning writes about being stopped by MTA security guards while photographing a bus depot in Brooklyn:
The search for lost history leads to odd spots sometimes, like Second Avenue, between 126th and 127th Streets, once the site of William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan-International movie studio. It is now home to the 126th Street Bus Depot, and that’s what I was taking a picture of last week — from the sidewalk across the avenue — when a property protection agent with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority approached me.
You can’t take pictures of transit facilities, he told me, politely but firmly.
It reminds me of the time I was in East Berlin in 1987 before the Wall came down looking for surviving examples of early 20th century architecture to photograph. At one point, looking for a housing project clearly shown on my map, I found myself standing–with my 4×5 view camera–in front of an enormous complex of buildings with video cameras mounted on the facades–not a common sight in the ’80s. Suddenly, uniformed guards began shouting and approaching. I ducked downstairs into a nearby subway station and made a clean getaway. Later, I realized that I had accidentally stumbled upon the East German Stasi headquarters, the secret police. I was lucky to have escaped.
The truth is I had been photographing for days all over East Berlin using my big camera without being accosted by the many “people’s police” who seemed to be everywhere. Such indifference is not the case in New York City in 2012. Despite recent clarifications of the law and the specific rules regarding photography in public places, I am routinely told by private security guards, police officers, and uncredentialed busy bodies that photography is not permitted. It is, in fact, allowed–even in the subways and buses.
But things are not so simple. A few days ago I took my camera to Lower Manhattan and did a number of photographs relating to my ongoing documentation of the World Trade Center, specifically the rise of 1 WTC, which is replacing the Twin Towers. It was a good day. No one stopped me. In the photograph above I was standing on a pedestrian bridge crossing over the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. I suspect that I was in an area under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a public/private authority with its own set of rules. They have stopped me in the past when I made photographs near the Holland Tunnel entrance.
Greenwich Street — © Brian Rose
In the picture above I was standing in a small public plaza adjacent to the tunnel entrance decorated with planters that were probably intended originally for security purposes. The city is littered with such barriers–mostly ugly and obviously ineffective. My guess is that the plaza is under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, which has its own rules governing photography and the use of tripods.
Vesey Street — © Brian Rose
And in the photograph above I was standing in the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City under the jurisdiction of the Battery Park City Authority which has its own rules regarding photography and tripods. Another photograph I tried to do recently was from the steps leading up to the Borough of Manhattan Community College which has jurisdiction over its open plaza–I was stopped by a friendly security guard–and another I made was from the Hudson River Park, which is under the jurisdiction of yet another public/private organization. I have no idea what their rules are. Additionally, there are dozens of public plazas that are actually privately owned, the result of crazy zoning deals that award developers with extra floor space in exchange for creating a public amenity. These spaces, like the recently occupied Zuccotti Park, exist in an ever growing twilight zone of public access under private control.
Most of the organizations that have jurisdiction over these spaces are benign in their intentions, but the result, nevertheless, is that they have ultimate control over our public commons and our city. Are we fast becoming a police state?
Update: George Will, of all people, defends photographers’ rights here in the Washington Post.
