Day Four My last day shooting in Berlin, the weather was tumultuous with dark clouds sweeping across the sky, sudden showers and gusts of wind. It ‘s the kind of day that can drive you crazy trying to manage the view camera and keep your wits about you. But it can also lead to moments […]

Day Three Once again I drove to Potsdamer Platz to begin the day. Not wanting to drive the car into Berlin Mitte where parking is difficult, I took the S-Bahn two stops to the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. Before 1989 this was the most common way to enter East Berlin as a visitor. The other, more famous […]

Day Two Began the day at the Potsdamer Platz Starbucks. That should give you an idea how much things have changed in Germany. Not to mention the fact that Potsdamer Platz was a desolate zone of abandonement with the Wall running through it until 1989. And then reconstruction only began in the mid-90s. The Platz […]

Day One I flew into Tegel airport, a hopelessly outmoded airport left over from the Cold War days, rented my car, and met up with my friend Anamarie at her house in Zehlendorf. It rained heavily all afternoon, so we went to the Martin-Gropius-Bau (museum) to see the Robert Polidori show. I have long admired […]

I’ve been working pretty much every day on the scans I did in New York a few weeks ago. There are about 45 images all together, 15 each from New York, Amsterdam, and Berlin. The plan is to print these at 20×24 inches for portfolio purposes with a few, perhaps, at 40×50 inches. I will […]

Ricoh GR Digital For the past few months I have been using the camera above, a wonderful pocket-sized digital camera. Despite my ongoing allegiance to the 4×5 view camera, I have been smitten with this baby camera with wide angle lens, and optical viewfinder (not shown in photo). I’ve been using it for this journal […]

The Iron Curtain, 1987 (4×5 film) As many of you already know, I recently published The Lost Border, the Landscape of the Iron Curtain, and most of the pictures from the book are also available on the Lost Border website. It is a project I began in 1985 when walls and fences traversed Europe dividing […]

PARIS, May 15 — The Dutch government on Monday abruptly threatened to revoke the citizenship of one of the country’s most prominent members of Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born woman who arrived as a refugee 14 years ago.–New York Times I have never cared for Hirsi Ali’s politics, which I’ve found polarizing and self-aggrandizing. […]

The weather remains unusually warm and pleasant here in the Netherlands. I am mostly working on the scans I did in New York, which will be printed for my New York/Amsterdam/Berlin portfolio. On Sunday we picked up Brendan, my son, from the island of Texel, on the North Sea coast. He was there visiting with […]

Amsterdam, hazy morning Back in Amsterdam, the weather was cold and wet for several days. But that has dramatically changed, and my studio is bathed in bright sunlight. The temperature is up near 70 degrees. Even though I place black foam board around my computer, it is difficult with so much light to work on […]

I’ve felt for a while that I needed to do more dusk and night photographs of the Lower East Side. The shop windows become more transparent as the sun goes down, and the street life changes as residents and tourists flock to the bars, restaurants, and clubs. Last night I went out at about 6, […]

Another beautiful day, patchy clouds, 70 degrees. I decided to give some attention to the thus far neglected Third Avenue border of what I am defining as the Lower East Side. Old timers still think of it as part of the LES, but newcomers are likely to know it only as the East Village. Whatever […]

After several mostly wet days, and lots of work on the computer, I returned to shooting on the Lower East Side. I took the subway down to City Hall, and walked along the approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge, the southern boundary of my project. At Front Street I noticed Photographic Gallery, ducked in briefly, and […]

The last few days have been life in photo hell sifting through hundreds of negatives from the past 25 years, taking them to the lab to scan on a high quality Imacon scanner. I’m putting together three sets of work: New York, Amsterdam, Berlin. There have been few overlooked pearls discovered, but it’s a good […]

Got out early this morning to catch the morning sun. It is a fact of life for those photographing buildings in New York that north facing facades only get a brief wash of sunlight each day, none at all in the winter. Manhattan is not precisely oriented north/south, but it’s close enough. Mars Bar My […]

Photoshop Working on my portfolio, a selection of images of New York, Amsterdam, and Berlin to be printed 20×24 inches or larger. Although I’ll be scanning the negatives on a high end Imacon scanner, I’m doing quick scans and reviewing images, using my desktop scanner and Photoshop.

New construction on Houston and Bowery Today, Easter Sunday, I returned to the streets of the Lower East Side. I began walking uptown past Houston and East 1st Street where massive construction is transforming the area. I stopped on East 2nd Street where I photographed a community garden and a new tower rising behind on […]

Amsterdam, raw and windy On my way to New York once again.