Tag: fence

Whitey’s

96th St and Second Avenue, New York

When I was a boy, living in the tall building in the background, right, there was a playground on this site which we called Whitey’s because the man who managed it was a Black man named Whitey. I can remember applying to him for the puck and sticks for an air hockey table that was sometimes set up there. The playground was a victim of the 2nd Avenue subway construction that went on for years and years (decades, really) before being abandoned (and eventually resuscitated). This is part of my project to capture memories from local residents as the neighborhood is rapidly gentrified.

Screened

Brooklyn, NY

I’ve been checking out what all the miscellaneous photo apps I have on my computer are, preparing to trade in my MacBook and found Tonality from MacPhun, apparently a B&W conversion tool. Looking for an unimportant file to play with I found this one from walking around Brooklyn during a workshop I did about 5 years ago with Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb. It looks pretty interesting, so I decided to post it.

Tower Steps

La Tour, Arles, France

In the last post on La Tour I had been trying to see Joel Coen introduce his curation of Lee Friedlander’s photographs but the crowds were too big and I was turned away. I returned the next day to see the show without Joel and capture some more of the stark geometry of the place.

Wooler

Wooler, Northumberland

The trip described in the last couple of posts was taken about a month ago – we were going to be walking along St Cuthbert’s Way in Northumberland, from Wooler to Holy Island/Lindisfarne. From the Berwick-upon-Tweed train station we were taken by taxi to our first night’s resting place in Wooler. After checking in, we took a walk around town. (Click any of the images below to see them enlarged.)

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).