Tag: tree

Roots that Clutch

Batiquitos Lagoon, Carlsbad

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water….

The Waste Land, T S Eliot

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.

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.