On Sunday I fetched the paper as usual, turned to the Metro section as usual, and was surprised to see a photograph of James Presson, the 16 year-old son of good friends of mine, along with two other students from Wilton High School who have created a play about Iraq told primarily through the voices […]

Times Square (4×5 film), late ’90s I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik’s most recent collection of essays, some previously published in the New Yorker, Through the Children’s Gate. After returning from two years in Paris, he rediscovers New York, especially as seen through his children’s eyes. In one essay he finds himself on school safety patrol […]

The former Leninplatz in East Berlin, 1990 (4×5 film) I saw The Lives of Others today sitting in a sparsely-filled midday showing at the Angelica on Houston Street. The movie, which recently won the best foreign language Oscar, is a deeply felt psychological thriller about life in the German Democratic Republic (DDR/East Germany) before the […]

Seagram Building and Alexander Calder Sculpture Aside from it’s architectural importance, the Seagram Building (designed by Mies van der Rohe), has personal significance to me. When I graduated from Cooper Union and began photographing the Lower East Side, the first prints I ever sold were to the Seagram collection. Phyllis Lambert of the Bronfman family, […]

Office reception overlooking Central Park (4×5 film) I’ve been busy this week with three photo shoots, all in Midtown, and the follow-up scanning and color correcting that I usually do myself. The photograph above was taken 45 floors up overlooking Central Park.

Houston Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougalIt’s a losing proposition writing anything about Jeff Wall at this point. The juggernaut of critical approbation along with Wall’s own avalanche of supporting text is more than a puny photographer like me can withstand. I find myself standing on the corner of Houston and Sixth Avenue gazing up […]

Civil War Soldiers’ Monument, Green-Wood Cemetery I’ve been pretty busy this week doing architectural shoots, but today I went to the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn to meet and talk with the organizers of an exhibition about the Civil War and New York. I may do a series of pictures for the exhibit. I did a […]

University of Virginia, me and my father Whenever I vist Williamsburg, Virginia–where I grew up–I always think about the presence of architecture exhibited in the mostly modest structures that were built there in the 18th century. The way in which ideas of a new civilization were carved into the wilderness. The most important of Virginia’s […]

Captain John Smith statue, Jamestown, Virginia The last few days I was in Williamsburg, Virginia to visit my 85 year old father who remains active despite the usual infirmities that come with a long life. We spent one day touring Colonial Williamsburg, and another at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. This […]

Ground Zero/WTC Ground Zero/WTC I took an exploratory walk with my view camera around the World Trade Center site today. It was in the mid-20s and icy underfoot, but the air was clear and sharp. I hadn’t been down there with my camera since just after 9/11, on Broadway, the first day they let people […]

Tippelzone (prostitution zone), Amsterdam (4×5 film) A few months ago I was invited by Joakim Sebring of the F Blog, a weblog on photography maintained by a group of photographers based in Sweden, to submit a series of my pictures of Amsterdam. It took me a while to get the portfolio together, but I have […]

Toys in BrooklynWe spent the weekend visiting friends in Brooklyn, shopping at the Strand bookstore, playing and helping with Junior Knicks basketball at the Y. But through it all I could never push out of my mind the war in Iraq, the President’s “surge,” and the sabre rattling aimed at Iran. The Times ran an […]

Orchard Street, New York City, February 11, 2006 (4×5 film) It’s been cold in New York City of late, but no snow. Upstate there’s 10 feet or more of the white stuff. Here it’s been dry as a bone. The Hudson is partly frozen over, but no snow. People talk about the snows of long […]

Brendan, my son, and the Unisphere My first trip to New York was in 1964, when I was 10 years old, to see the World’s Fair. I traveled from Virginia with my father in a tiny English Ford, and we camped in a state park on Long Island to save money, over an hour away […]

From Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Scrap Book, Thames & Hudson An interesting print in the Cartier-Bresson exhibit at ICP shows an uncropped version of the famous photo (behind St. Lazare station) in which a man leaps across a pool of water, his foot a millimeter from touching the surface with his image mirrored in it. The ICP […]

The Empire State Building from 6th Avenue and 42nd Street (near ICP) Given the current preference for very large exhibition prints, the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at ICP is exceptional in that most of the prints are no more than 9×12 centimeters–smaller than 4×5 inches. The prints were originally made for a scrapbook that Cartier-Bresson created […]

ICP window with Cartier-Bresson photograph I went up to ICP (the International Center of Photography) today to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit. It’s actually paired with an exhibit of Martin Munkacsi, a photographer who influenced Bresson, and who became fabulously successful doing fashion and magazine work. No doubt, Munkacsi made numerous vivid images–dancers, athletes, and […]

Renée, my wife, on the roof of our building Just a quick post to note that we are now fully moved to New York and open for business. It’s been a difficult couple of months locating an apartment, finding a school for our son Brendan, packing up in Amsterdam, and then moving into our place […]