Yearly Archives: 2016
144. PASSAGES. Saint Thomas, US Virgin Islands. Christopher Columbus “sighted” this island in 1493. The photo has an odd look, more like a studio setup with a fake background than an extemporanious landscape. Speaking of which, for some of the best studio-for-outdoors shots, take a look at Fellini’s La Dolce Vita for the scenes on (an entirely constructed) Via Veneto. The word iconic is thrown around a lot these days, but Anouk Aimee and Marcello Mastroianni in black and white at Cinecitta? Spettacolare.
143. PASSAGES. Quintana Roo, Mexico. Who says digital cameras can’t render like analog? Taken on a cheap DSLR with a plastic lens. The image would have lost something with better equipment. What did that Canadian Marshall Mcluhen say? The medium is the message?
142. PASSAGES. Bailiwick of Jersey, Channel Islands. Nothing located in the frigid and rainy English Channel could resemble the pacific climate of the Mediterranean, but some glimpses of Jersey put one in mind of Monaco. They are both famous European tax havens. Who’s counting, but the yachts are far bigger on the Cote d’Azur.
141. PASSAGES. Bailiwick of Jersey, Channel Islands. One of a group of islands off the coast of Normandy. Not quite English, not quite French, modern but with traces of old world European charm. It is one of the worlds “leading offshore financial centers”. Its climate is far more temperate than what you would expect in the English Channel.
140. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Midtown East. UN protests and heavy auto traffic are common in East Midtown. Recently published figures: 731,000 automobiles enter Manhattan below 60th street daily; it takes 40 minutes to drive the (two mile) width of Manhattan at rush hour; the average auto travels at 8.2 MPH in Manhattan (only 2.5 times average human walking speed); and it costs three to five thousand dollars per annum to rent parking in Midtown. A native Manhattanite I know calls it the Midwestern Diet: people move here, ditch the ride, and the walking loses them ten pounds in the first month.
139. TRAVELS IN INDIA. Kamathipura, Mumbai. A mundane scene, but it contains a lot of India. Cows and carters, which you see everywhere, but take a look at the narrow workshop in the background. All over India you will see people working in these tiny spaces. Welders, shoemakers, carpenters, machinists, tailors–you name it. Kamathipura has hundreds of them, making for a lot of noise and activity. Kama is also a famous red light district, and the ladies often set up right next to the workshops. Of course Indians are completely unfazed by this rather odd juxtaposition.
138. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Northwestern Williamsburg just in from the East River has some of New York’s more interesting post-industrial scenery. This shot is another example of why just putting on a good pair of shoes and getting constructively lost is the best way to discover New York’s quirky splendor. The photo is nothing without the lifts in the background, although the bright sky pushed the camera sensor far beyond its capabilities. They were worth it.
137. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Willamsburg Bridge. Looking southwest, Brooklyn is to the left, lower Manhattan to the right. The Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges in the middle background. A walking visit to New York should not miss a trip or two across the Billy Bridge, especially at dusk. One of the more interesting views in the city.
136. PASSAGES. Miami Beach, Florida. It gets pretty simple sometimes, a beach and a good polarizing filter. Cameras and sand are not a match made in heaven, but sand, water and sun definitely are. I can see why people walk so slowly here.
135. PASSAGES. Miami. Sea, sky and city at dawn. Looking west across Biscayne Bay, a series of small islands in the foreground and the Miami skyline in the background. One of the real pleasures here are the sea breezes which carry that unmistakably fragrant Caribbean air. The southeastern coasts of the USA are an interesting hybrid of Western Europe, Spain, Africa and Mesoamerica.
134. PASSAGES. South Beach, Miami. The big Art Deco hotels of South Beach are worth seeing if you like bold stylistic statements, but the quiet stuff is just as interesting. “SoBe” feels like a mix of Beverly Hills and Venice Beach, with a whiff of Charleston and (oddly) Singapore thrown in. The idea is to photograph early or late, because the white buildings are impossible in the equatorial midday glare.
133. NEW YORK ON FOOT. East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. East Williamsburg, a so-called “lonely industrial wasteland”, is one of the purest examples of New York’s grimy beauty. I don’t think they do walking tours here.
132. PASSAGES. Monaco. Mediterranean culture is the pinnacle of something, the Occident was pretty much invented there for one thing and you can see why–add the genius of the French to it and you really have something. I am stuck in 1920’s France thanks to the interwar work of Ernest Hemingway, but that doesn’t explain why every photo I took in Monaco came back feeling like Art Deco.
131. PASSAGES. South Padre Island, Texas. There is a big difference between traveling for vacation versus traveling for education, but against my better judgement I was convinced to do a “sun vacation” on this narrow strip of an island in the Gulf of Mexico. The rain and freezing temperatures forced me to buy a winter jacket on the first afternoon, and I lost the bag with my wallet while doing so. The rest of the week was a frustrating search that made enemies of the hotel staff and half the town. It turned up on the afternoon of the last day, brought to my hotel by the guy who found it, a tough-as-nails Mexican cowboy. I thanked him for his honesty and made some pretentious speech about integrity, but all he said was “I couldn’t keep it. It doesn’t go with any of my outfits.”
130. PASSAGES. Century City, Los Angeles. The contrast between New York and Los Angeles is legendary, and there are clearly deep cultural, historical, climatic and economic differences. That aside, the two places could not look less alike. I suspect that three-quarters of the car commercials made in the USA are shot in Century City. That gleaming glass and steel image belies LA’s grit, but there is no mistaking that the Pacific coast of America is more pacific.
129. PASSAGES. Lubbock, Texas. Manhattan is exotic, but living there eventually makes it feel normal and everything else exotic. The stillness of Lubbock might begin to explain why so many New Yorkers are fascinated with Texas. The French word quotidien comes to mind, as does the title of a Hemingway short story, “A Way You Will Never Be”.
128. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Williamsburg Bridge. My ambition as an immigrant to New York was to walk all the bridges, a feat frustrated by the Verrazano having no pedestrian walkways and losing patience with the 103rd Street Footbridge (a “vertical lift” bridge raised for ships on the East River, and one of the quirkiest structures in the Western Hemisphere). The Williamsburg Bridge is as much a sculpture as a conveyance, and gets my vote even if the Brooklyn Bridge is more famous. Why are we incapable of such magnificent public infrastructure nowadays?
127. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Sunnyside, Queens. Aside from an inexplicable affection for this gritty district of Queens, the image proves the serial fact that the most dramatic views of Manhattan do not happen in Manhattan.
126. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Gramercy, Manhattan. To counter a brutal late summer heat and humidity wave in New York, I present a cool winter sky. Manhattan has an unbelievable number of micro neighborhoods with distinct styles, histories and characters–every four blocks it seems. The dense shadows and short days of winter can make for sun starvation in these canyons. Streets in Manhattan have a shady and a sunny side–you walk the warmer sun side in winter and the shade in summer.
125. PASSAGES. Isla Mujeres, Mexico. I spent a month on this tiny island on the Caribbean coast, taking long walks after the brain was frazzled from script writing. I met this chap on my first walk and he became a great friend. Everything has the drawbacks of its advantages, a lifetime of travel included. Perpetual forward movement is also perpetual friends abandoned.