165. PASSAGES. Century City, Los Angeles. I misread the title of an article called The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles (discussing wealth by race), and thought it said The Color Wealth of Los Angeles. Not to denigrate a serious topic, but color is one of the riches of LA. Maybe its the nonstop sunshine, but even the gritty parts of LA seem light, bright and pastel, especially to an eye accustomed to the beautiful grime of New York city. Coastal communities often paint their buildings in bright colors–to be more visible to the returning boats I am told. One can’t forget the Latin American heritage of LA; it reminds me of Mexico, which to a Northerner comes off as an electric color culture.
164. PASSAGES. Georgetown, Washington DC. A historic neighborhood that predates the formation of DC. It reminds me of Charleston SC, but any place with a whiff of Confederate architecture reminds me of Charleston. Washington is on the dividing line between the Northeast and the Confederate South–two cultures that are polar opposites. With its restless political energy, with Baltimore and Chesapeake Bay just down the road, Washington is a city full of beautiful contradictions.
163. PASSAGES. Washington, DC. Being an inveterate traveler develops some unconventional measures of the world. For example, I have long believed that a good measure of a region’s wealth is the amount of electric light it can afford to waste on decoration. I have seen small towns in the developing world where a sole flourescant bulb in the village square after dark is the extent of it. One reads statistics about the USA being the world’s biggest economy, but statistics are abstract and unreal. Take a tour of the DC monuments at night to understand the wealth and resources of this country.
162. PASSAGES. Washington, DC. With its wide, breezy avenues and epic public buildings, DC puts one in mind of New Delhi. The National Mall brings back fond memories of the area around India Gate. DC also looks a little like Paris in places, possibly because the city planner for modern Washington was a Parisian who left art school to join the American Revolution, taking sides with the “rebelling colonials”.
161. NEW YORK ON FOOT. East Midtown. The quotidien life and weather of a great city. New York winters are of the North Atlantic variety, sleety and damp like London or Paris. There are plenty of heavy snow dumps, but they melt into a foot-soaking mess after a day or two.
160. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Kips Bay, Manhattan. Evening summer light, neon, and sidewalk life in an impersonal stretch of far east Manhattan. The green cast of the flourescents in the deli evoke a different time.
159. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Central Park. Dogs and daffodils on a spring day at Cedar Hill. Cedar Hill’s nickname is Dog Hill, due to the fact that between 6 and 7am the area is inundated with hundreds of offleash Manhattan canines having the time of their lives. Kids and dogs were not built to be cooped up in small apartments, which is why I believe theirs is the purest love for a much loved place.
158. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Harlem. Looking north at the bottom of the hill that transitions the Upper East Side into El Barrio (AKA Spanish or East Harlem). The two communities are not alike (to put it mildly). The various hills in Manhattan were named when the island was rural, “mostly hills and shrubbery”. The bucolic place names are ironic, Turtle Bay being the most iconic. I have tried walking the boundaries of Murray and Carnegie Hill a few times, but it is not easy to navigate hills in the urban tangle.
157. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Staten Island. An outer borough that looks anything but outer borough.
156. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The moniker “outer borough” is commonly used in New York, referring to the four boroughs that are not Manhattan. Having cut my teeth in Brooklyn, I will never see New York as Manhattan Only. This photo shows two common features of the outer boroughs: the elevated subway tracks and the low rise dwellings (both of which you will find in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn–but not Staten Island, which is another world again).
155. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Astoria, Queens. The NYC subway is an endless source of interest.
154. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year…” Okay, so Edgar Allen Poe lived in the Bronx not Brooklyn. This reminds me of the Ashcan School, an American movement of painters whose subdued palette reflects the industrial Northeast: “Some members of this new generation were interested in creating a new type of art that reflected life in the growing cities across America. In sharp contrast to the conventional and rather genteel American Impressionism that represented the most popular American art of the period, these American Realists set about capturing the spontaneous moments of urban life.” Take a look at them, they capture the light and mood perfectly.
153. PASSAGES. Singapore. A city state with a look all its own. The gloom was a result of something called the “2015 Southeast Asian Haze”. From Wikipedia: The 2015 Southeast Asian haze was an air pollution crisis affecting several countries in Southeast Asia. It was the latest occurrence of the Southeast Asian haze, a long-term issue that occurs during every dry season in the region. It is caused by forest fires resulting from illegal slash-and-burn practices, principally on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan.
152. NEW YORK ON FOOT. The Bronx. Niether digital nor analog could save the tonal range of this photo because it wasn’t there in the first place, but when raw horsepower is needed analog leaves fewer contaminants behind. The relatively empty spaces and open sky of the Bronx can leave one feeling wistful on a lazy summer evening.
151. PASSAGES. Charlotte, North Carolina. I doubt a picture says a thousand words, but a picture certainly can cause a thousand words. I read an article recently where the author argued that on the scale of safety versus liberty, the USA leans heavily toward liberty. In 1776 this country decided to step out of the mainstream of Occidental civilization and go it alone. As an immigrant from a British colony, I am only beginning to understand the place, but my affection for it grows despite the overheated rhetoric that images like the above provoke. “This country is hard on people” is a line from No Country for Old Men, another uncomfortable snapshot of America.
150. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Turtle Bay, Manhattan. It seems that every 19th Century European painter took a shot at the “Paris street, rain at dusk” picture. There is something archetypal about turning up one’s collar against the rain while looking in envy at warm interiors, and the orange glow of tungsten light is the perfect foil for the cold blue of a rainy winter sky. Its a scene that I never tire of. The blur caused by camera shake and a bad lens makes the image more painterly.
149. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Taken at the northern tip of Brooklyn, looking across Newtown Creek into Queens. The image has that unique sunlight effect of some coastal cities–I have seen it in New York, Vancouver, Galway, Los Angeles and various places around the Mediterranean, but never in the tropics. Maybe its a Northern Hemisphere thing.
148. PASSAGES. Valley Stream, Long Island. Taken six weeks after Hurricane Sandy 25 miles from Manhattan. This quiet suburban street didn’t make the news because it was nothing compared to what happened in Gerritsen Beach or Breezy Point. New York is difficult enough without superstorms.
147. PASSAGES. Montreal. I have long believed that islands make the most interesting cultures. Something about isolation, and without the ability to sprawl island cultures tend to concentrate rather than dissipate. An analogy is Peter O’toole telling Charlie Rose that it is better to deepen rather than broaden for an actor to achieve more powerful effects. Quebec is an island of eight million Francophones in Anglo North America. It is both Europe and North America, yet something else completely. In the art of living it is certainly a step above.
146. PASSAGES. The Berkshires, Massachusetts. This wooded, mountainous region is revered by Northeasterners. Even the names around here have a Northeastern sound: the Taconic Mountains, the “marble valleys of the Hoosic River”, the Hudson Highlands, and all of it bordered by “Metacomet Ridge geology”. The Berkshire mountain ranges were formed 500 million years ago when Africa collided with North America. Imagine that.