The Bowery Without comment.

East 2nd Street (4×5 film) A spring picture–from a year ago, actually–but one that I’ve just gotten around to scanning. It shows the Bowery Hotel under construction, and a couple of pre-Civil War structures that survived the wave of tenement buildings that replaced most of the townhouses in the area. This picture was taken on […]

Brendan holding order buzzer at the Shake Shack Today was sunny and warm–the first really warm day of Spring. Brendan and I hit the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park beneath the Met Life clock and a stone’s throw from the Flatiron Building. The line was 15 minutes, but was twice as long when we […]

Williamsburg, Brooklyn I let my 9 year old son Brendan stay up and watch the ABC News Democratic debate because he has become interested in the campaign and wants to feel a part of what is going on. He is broadly familiar with the big issues like the war in Iraq, global warming, poverty, etc. […]

Flushing, Queens One of the reasons for visiting Flushing was to do a photograph for an article being written by my wife for a Dutch magazine on the sub-prime mortgage issue. She is an urban planner, currently working on the staff of Community Board 4 (Chelsea and the west side of Midtown). Most of the […]

The 7 train on the way to Flushing, Queens Shea Stadium (left) and Citi Field (right) I took the 7 train out to Flushing to scout a location for later photography. Along the way, I stopped at Shea Stadium where a new Mets stadium, Citi Field, is under construction. For a short period of time […]

I am hooked on a photo blog called Shorpy in which members post photographs from the 19th and first part of the 20th century. Some of the images are are from FSA photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Jack Delano. There are over 200 Lewis Hine images on Shorpy, mostly of children working […]

Williamsburg, Brooklyn Without comment.

East Berlin 1987 (4×5 film) Continuing with photographs I made on several walks through Berlin Mitte before the Wall came down. The most obvious thing one noticed when crossing the border to East Berlin was the profound devastation still visible from World War II 42 years after the fact. The DDR had taken on a […]

Two more photos made in East Berlin before the Wall came down. East Berlin 1987 (4×5 film) East Berlin 1987 (4×5 film)

Neue Synagoge, Oranienburger Strasse, Berlin, 1987 (4×5 film) I’ve been scanning a series of pictures I made in 1987 in what was then East Berlin. This was a somewhat difficult proposition given the nature of the communist state of the DDR. Carrying a view camera across the border elicited the attention of the border agents, […]

Barbed wire fence along the Austrian/Hungarian border, 1987 (4×5 film) There was an interesting article in today’s New York Times about former East Germans who attempted to escape the communist state of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) by a circuitous, and dangerous, route through Bulgaria. For those of you unfamiliar with the Iron Curtain, it […]

Union Square Park, New York, September 2001 19 hijackers, mostly from Saudi Arabia, trained or directed by Bin Laden in Afghanistan killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. As a result: 4,000 Americans now dead in Iraq. Tens of thousands of others dead. Untold number of casualties, both physical […]

Ypenburg, The Netherlands, (4×5 film) I’ve been spending a lot of time with my architectural photography archive of late. Most of the early pictures are 4×5 transparencies, the favored film format at the time. Later, I switched to negative film, which better handled mixed interior lighting, and those negs were duped on positive print film. […]

Esto Photographics, Mamaroneck, New York Visited Esto today, the architectural photography agency, and legacy of the great photographer of buildings Ezra Stoller. I met with Erica Stoller, Ezra’s daughter, who runs the place, showed my work for possible inclusion in their stock portfolio, and got a tour of the facilities. (Thanks for the hospitality.) The […]

St. Mark’s Place I walked today along St. Mark’s Place between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. It’s the same semi-tawdry strip that it’s always been despite the transformation of so much of the East Village. When I first came to New York in 1977 there were few places in the neighborhood to get a haircut–one was […]

Eldridge Street Synagogue (4×5 film) From a few weeks ago–I made this picture from the stoop of a tenement building. As I’ve written before, I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to photograph the synagogue so that one is aware of the surrounding visual cacophony of Chinatown. This image doesn’t exactly do that, but […]

Eldridge Street (4×5 film) Just getting around to scanning some earlier Lower East Side photographs including the view above of Eldridge Street in Chinatown. Allen Street (4×5 film) No more Polaroid and other digital issues There are several interrelated things that are of great concern to me these days all related to changing technology. The […]