Tag: Autumn

Taking the Gardens Away

93rd St and Columbus Avenue, New York

Another soapbox issue of mine – the Upper West Side Urban Renewal Project – a plan first mooted in the late 1950s to “clear slums” and redevelop the area. Developers were given mighty concessions to bulldoze people’s homes and rebuild, while making few concessions of their own. One of those was the provision of public garden spaces. In my neighborhood this was most often met with an open expanse of cement holding a withered sapling in a concrete box, or something a tad nicer, surrounded by a fence to keep out people from the neighborhood. With the expiration of these requirements after a period of about 20 years, building owners rushed to build retail space on the sites of these barren “gardens” (increased revenue), topping them with private parks open only to the residents of their buildings. So now we must look up to see our crown of thorns.

West St Cemetery, Farnham

In class last month we were studying some of the history of painting that could be relevant to our photography and looking at the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, I learned about the world landscape style, in which an imaginary panoramic landscape is seen from an elevated viewpoint. The horizon is high in the picture, giving the viewer a bird’s eye view of the scene. The physical canvas is large, and the characters are small. Bruegel deploys this in The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, among others.  The high viewpoint and the mass of small figures show strong compositional similarities to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, for example. So I started taking some pictures from a higher viewpoint, looking down at a panorama that might be a back plate for such a scene (click the images below to see them larger).