NY Through the Lens - New York City Photography

Street art mural. Soho, New York City.

Just a small announcement that my Instacanvas store finally went live this evening! It’s basically a place to purchase my Instagram photos on canvas and thus will only ever contain the snippets of New York City that I capture with my phone. Here it is:

New York City Photography on Instacanvas

My regular photography store is still over on SmugMug where you can find my more formal photography:

New York City Photography Store

That is all! :)

I hope that everyone is having a splendid evening (or morning/afternoon depending on where you are in the world).

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View my photography for sale here, email me, or ask for help.

Street art and a bicycle. Soho, New York City

Through each scattered urban landscape every sidewalk dream unfolds periphally as daily adventurers traverse the city full of promise and silent giddy trepidation.

It’s in the quiet still moments marked by emptiness, vast loneliness and encroaching solitude that these peripheral dreamscapes come into focus.

These moments, suspended in time, marinate in the severity of their potential to eventually etch themselves into the eternity of the mind.

The rest of time moves with the rapid ebb and flow of life like bits and pieces of paint on a wall chipping and peeling off, finally scattering like a discarded lover’s flower petals in the wind.

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Buy “Sidewalk Dream - Street Art - New York City” Prints here, email me, or ask for help.

Chinatown rooftop graffiti. Two Bridges, New York City.

New York City is an urban layer cake.

This is another one of my favorite views in lower Manhattan. It’s a small segment of an entire universe that exists above millions of New Yorkers.

Layers of colorful graffiti cover the rooftops of these Chinatown apartment buildings as rooftop doors blow open in the wind and colorful clothing sways on clotheslines high above the city below.

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Buy “Chinatown Rooftop Graffiti - New York City” Posters and Prints here, email me, or ask for help.

FAILE street art. Houston and Bowery. East Village, New York City.

FAILE is a street art collaboration between Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. This wheat-paste masterpiece is the current project of theirs that graces the iconic wall at the corner of Houston Street and the Bowery.

When I was really young I used to imagine that at night when the majority of people went to sleep in New York City, all of the graffiti and street art on the walls would come to life. I still like to think this is the case.

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Freeman Alley on a bitterly cold night. Lower East Side, New York City.

The winter gives New York City a more clearly defined edge. It’s an edge that can be found off the beaten path during nights when the windchill dips into the negative. The lights flicker like icy cold stars leading the way down alleys and streets not well traversed late at night.

Monotonous rushes of wind rhythmically pulse through these stark pathways lined by the frozen tears of winter that cling desperately to the ground and in the distance the warm glow of a distant sun penetrates winter’s frigid grasp.

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V-J Day in Times Square re-imagined. Brooklyn, New York City.

We live in times where other eras are referenced and re-appropriated rapidly and with wild abandon. One could potentially craft dozens upon dozens of essays critiquing our post-post-modern times (and many great critiques already exist).

I came across this rapidly decaying piece of street art last year in Brooklyn. It barely stood out since it was on a store gate that was almost entirely enveloped in shadows. This image is of the famous V-J Day in Times Square photo taken initially by Alfred Eisenstadt on on August 14, 1945. V-J Day was a day in 1945 when the surrender of Japan occurred resulting (loosely) in the end of World War II. It was one of the first times that Japan’s Emperor Hirohito broadcast anything publicly to the Japanese people over the radio and it was to announce the surrender. I am currently taking a class called Asian American Memoirs where we have been covering this time period in a rather intense fashion from the point of view of Japanese Americans. It’s a sobering experience and it makes my heart swell with sadness.

This enduring image has come to represent elation, victory, romance, abandon and joy. However the context is important because when you peel back the layers you realize that history isn’t so tidy and that there are many sides to the story that unfolds with this kiss and subsequent image. One could argue that over time this eternal image of a kiss between a sailor and a nurse has come to develop its own meaning detached from what the subjects were celebrating.

It seems fitting that this image was re-appropriated as a paste-up decaying rapidly yet captured by the same snap of a camera much like the original image was captured.

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Street art on a store gate. Lower East Side, New York City.

Layers of paint, grit, decay and meaning make me fall in love with New York City over and over again.

Elaborate painted dreamscapes unfold on slumbering store gates surrounded by the discarded remnants of every yesterday and today.

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Buy “Every Yesterday - Lower East Side - New York City” Posters and Prints here, email me, or ask for help.

Old and new on a cobblestone street at night. Soho, New York City

The city is composed of many layers. Each layer wraps around the previous layer as the years pass preserved only in fading memory. Under the soft flicker of street lamps you can sometimes catch these battle-scarred battered remains. These transient pieces of the urban landscape are but a pause in the forward momentum of the city; a tattered sigh and a ragged exhale at the end of an excited phrase

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Store gate poetry. Lower East Side, New York City.

The momentary incantations offered up to all who partake in the ritual of observation are what define the urban environment if only for a moment. They are fleeting parts of the visual landscape that embed themselves into the memory of the city.

This reads: “Every crystal falling, turns the water of the eye, folding bright shapes, a dreamer stays high, casting sculptures, myths and smiles vast in the front of each wave, handing down letters, flowers by your bed and a light surrounding your every dance.” - Author’s initial: RDK

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The roof top graffiti of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Two Bridges, New York City

Looking out over the roof tops of Chinatown, it’s hard not to notice the layers of graffiti that cover the tops of the tenements. Roof top doors are often ajar and clothes carefully hung on clotheslines to dry sway in the wind .

These tenements are part of an area called Two Bridges which sits between the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge at the southern end of the Lower East Side in an area that is also disputed to be Chinatown.

Sitting along the East River, Two Bridges has long been a dwelling spot for many different immigrant communities over the years. It sits alongside the infamous and historic Five Points area where Irish, Jewish and Italian gangs battled to the death in the mid-19th century. Currently home to a large community of Chinese immigrants, many of the buildings are tenements dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A neighborhood council was formed for the Two Bridges neighborhood back in the 1950s. “At that time, the area was becoming one of the City’s first racially integrated neighborhoods. Tensions were high and gang violence was common. Two Bridges was created to resolve racial conflicts and to serve as a channel for communication among settlement houses, churches, and community leaders.

By the early 1970s, large-scale real estate development, which threatened to level a large swath of the neighborhood, was the principal obstacle to community harmony. The mission of the neighborhood council evolved to focus on neighborhood preservation and the creation of affordable housing. Two Bridges became the most successful nonprofit affordable housing developer of in Lower Manhattan, creating more than 1,500 units of low- and moderate-income housing.” Source

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The Andy Monument, a tribute to Andy Warhol. Union Square, New York City.

This is a public art installation tribute monument of Andy Warhol by artist Rob Pruitt. It went up at the end of March and will be on view in Union Square until October. It is situated on this particular corner since this is where Andy Warhol would stand when he signed and gave away copies of Interview magazine. It is also just steps away from the Factory:

“In 1968, Andy moved the Factory to the sixth floor of the Decker Building, 33 Union Square West, near Max’s Kansas City, a club Warhol and his entourage would frequently visit.

By the time Warhol had become famous, he was working day and night on his paintings. To create his art, Warhol used silkscreens so that he could mass-produce images the way capitalist corporations mass produce consumer goods. In order to continue working the way he did, he assembled a menagerie of adult film performers, drag queens, socialites, drug addicts, musicians, and free-thinkers that became known as the Warhol Superstars, to help him. These “art-workers” helped him create his paintings, starred in his films, and basically developed the atmosphere for which the Factory became legendary.

Aside from his two-dimensional art, Andy also used the Factory as a base to make shoes, films, commissions, sculptures and just about everything else that the Warhol name could be attached to and sold. His first commissions consisted of a single silkscreen portrait for $25,000, with additional canvases in other colors for $5,000 each. He later made that $20,000. Warhol used a large portion of his income to finance the lifestyle of his Factory friends, practically showering them with resources. - Source

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All eyes on you. Street art. Lower East Side, New York City.

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Jules Julien - Rebus mural, part of a series - via Overall Murals and an important article about Google + and what it means for photographers. East Village, New York City.

There are a few articles making the rounds on the internet regarding Google Plus’s TOS and how it affects photographers. Their wording is rather scary and if you don’t read through the actual contract and/or simply go by what is said in these articles (not going to link to them because I feel they are wrong on quite a few levels) you probably will come away with a healthy dose of fear.

However, I am going to take the time to link to what I feel is a far better article. It’s about why the Google + contract isn’t the root of all evil and why this is all a (in relative terms) non-issue. The article which I urge everyone to read is: How I Evaluate Terms of Service for Social Media Web Sites – Google+ written by professional photographer (and avid Google + user) Jim M. Goldstein. The article is good for several reasons. Jim breaks down the contract piece by piece after also describing how to think in terms of intellectual property as a photographer (which is useful in and of itself to be quite frank).

As someone who has a contract with Getty Images and who has been enjoying an unprecedented level of positive engagement on Google + with other photographers and photography enthusiasts over the past week, I am not worried. Your mileage may vary.

You can find me on Google + here: My Google + profile. Feel free to add me if you wish. :)

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The last days of Mars Bar. East Village, New York City

I have written about Mars Bar and its demise many times now, I know. However, there is something about this image that resonates with me.

It was taken a few weeks back on an oppressively humid and rainy day. I was on my way to my local grocery store which is in the same area and I stopped to talk to a Mars Bar regular who was standing and staring wistfully at the wall in the image in this post. We talked about the history of the street art on the facade, his life in the East Village twenty years ago and he shared some off-the-wall stories about his experiences at Mars Bar over the years. He wanted to know why I wanted photos of “the joint”.

I looked at him and said “I want to possess a relic of that certain something that is long gone from this neighborhood, that something that Mars Bar possesses that can’t quite be found here in the East Village anymore.” He looked at me, took a long drag of his cigarette and then nodded in agreement.

A few days ago, Gothamist published an opinion article called Mars Bar Will Close In “Four To Six Weeks” And That Is OK which incited some passionate comments. A key quote from the article was: “If you loved Mars Bar you should mourn it (you loved it after all) and move on. Trust us, the owners will be fine. But please—oh, please—when it finally closes can we not turn it into the commercialized fake memory that CBGB’s has become, with T-shirts sold to tourists by the truckload? Because, to use a phase often heard in the bar, fuck that.”

I agree with this sentiment. I appreciate the mourning for the loss of Mars Bar because the mourning is really over the loss of many of the things that made the East Village into something special years ago. It’s the loss of that certain something that drove us to the East Village and the Lower East Side initially, the hard edged creativity fueled not by development money but by little more than dreams and gumption. It’s hard to not mourn, quite frankly.

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