The city of New York has proposed requiring permits for photography and film making in the street. The Mayor’s Office of Theater, Film, and Broadcasting, which coordinates film and television production and issues permits around the five boroughs, is considering rules that could potentially severely restrict the ability of even amateur photographers and filmmakers to […]

Houston and Bowery Billy’s Antiques is a piece of craziness that holds on despite the gentrification around it. I’m sure that part of its longevity is the fact that this junk/curio/antique tent occupies a slender margin of land along Houston Street, not really wide enough for a building. Across the Bowery at Houston Street, Daniel […]

Third Avenue/Cooper Square and East 7th Street (4×5 film) I finally finished photographing 39 buildings all around town for a real estate client. Whew. After completing the last shot I walked down Third Avenue to Cooper Square where new construction is transforming the landscape. In the foreground, a construction fence surrounds the site of Cooper […]

Stanton Street, just off the Bowery I often walk across town on Prince Street through Nolita (northern Little Italy) and Soho. It’s a familiar environment, one that I generally take for granted. But when I slow down a bit, and look into the flow of people, the blur of signage, the play of light and […]

The New Museum on the Bowery The new New Museum is beginning to take shape. It’s on the Bowery just around the corner from my apartment on Stanton Street, and I pass it nearly every day. The architects are Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. They do terrific stuff. Like it or not (think […]

The Brooklyn Bridge We took a harbor tour yesterday with friends from the Netherlands. The tour was fascinating–a look at the working harbor–but we ended up afterwards in a tourist restaurant at the South Street Seaport, a greasy meal accompanied by a moaning crooner on guitar. When he did Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond, stopping […]

Christopher StreetMy friend Suzanne Vega has just come out with Beauty and Crime, her first album in a number of years, and the first since being cut by her previous record company. When someone like Suzanne gets tossed, you need no more proof of how deeply lost the record business is. Fortunately, for her, and […]

Since settling back in New York after ping-ponging between NYC and Amsterdam for 15 years, I’ve made contact with several friends who I lost track during that time. One of them, Tim Raymond, came down from Upstate New York for a visit. Tim’s a painter who I met back in Baltimore in the mid-seventies when […]

Chrysler Building • mid-1980s • 4×5 transparency As is understood by anyone who photographs this city, it is a landscape of anecdotal, small moments, and iconic majesty–both. This is an image from my archive made with a 4×5 view camera in the early to mid-eighties. I was on a setback of an apartment building in […]

Vanderbilt and Atlantic Avenues, Brooklyn Random moment, early morning, while shooting a building in Brooklyn.

Dean Street, BrooklynJohn Szarkowski, photographer and former photo curator of the Museum of Modern Art died a few days ago. Much has been written about his significance in bringing photography fully into its own as a medium deserving the same attention as painting and sculpture. He’s the guy who moved the Modern from Family of […]

Hudson StreetWalking home this evening.

Monitor and Merrimac monument by Antonio de Filippo (1900–1993) A few days ago I returned to McGolrick Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to photograph the Monitor and Merrimac monument. I am photographing Civil War related monuments around Brooklyn for an exhibit this fall. McGolrick is a peaceful neighborhood park surrounded by mostly modest houses, many with […]

Seventh Avenue Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. Abraham Lincoln

East 14th Street and Third Avenue The weather has been spectacular lately, and I have been out shooting as much as possible. I am still photographing a long list of buildings for a client–almost done now–and wish there was more time for other photography. On Sunday morning I zipped over to East 16th and Third […]

Ground Zero It is hard to quantify the impact of September 11th now almost 6 years ago. As I walk by the vast pit of the excavated WTC site ringed by skyscrapers old and new, I cannot think but how poisoned the well of our democracy has become–the result of that unprecedented act of barbarism–how […]

The New York Times buildingFrom the ridiculous (post below) to the sublime, the New York Times Building by Renzo Piano. It’s restrained, yes. Even conservative, perhaps. But there are few skyscrapers that achieve this kind of purity, even beauty. The one just to the right, for instance.

Midtown Still working on photographing 39 buildings, mostly in Midtown and the Upper East Side.