What I Saw

And to Think That I Saw it on Detroit Street

2012-02-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

Nipper and the Queen, 2012

I grew up in the generation of Little Golden Books and Dr. Suess. I was first introduced to Dr. Suess with The Cat in the Hat and Yertle the Turtle. One of my favorite Dr. Suess books, though, is And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. A little boy, wanting to have something impressive to tell his father when the old man gets home from work, conceives of an elaborate fantasy involving a vast menagerie of animals and human oddities that supposedly marched down Mulberry Street that day. If memory serves me right, the little boy decides in the end not to test his father’s patience with such an outlandish tale and instead tells him about real life, which turns out to be more interesting. (That Suess was always about life lessons, wasn’t he?)

Dr. Suess, whose real name was Theodore Geisel, came along at a time when talented people could still send unsolicited manuscripts and illustrations to famous magazines and be discovered. Geisel graduated from from Dartmouth and then studied at Oxford University. He came into the workforce during the Great Depression and got by doing advertising artwork for General Electric, NBC and others. (Didn’t Kurt Vonnegut also start out as a writer at GE? Their corporate marketing and PR departments must have been an incredible incubator of talent in those days!)

Shall we shag now, or shall we shag later? 2012

Many people probably think of Dr. Suess as an illustrator. His drawings and characterizations continue to fascinate. But who can forget the marvelous poetry of many of his books? Aside from Sunday school prayers, I’ll bet I’m not the only one of us who first learned to recognize poetry from reading Dr. Suess books. (Suess wrote poetry almost exclusively in anapestic tetrameter; essentially four beats to each line.)

I had one of those Mulberry Street moments not long ago on Detroit Street in Portsmouth, Virginia. While it’s name might conjure images of a grand urban boulevard, Detroit Street is an unassuming cross street, home to a couple of restaurants, churches, assorted small businesses and residences.

One of the storefronts on Detroit Street has been converted into a home. The front window, however, retains its original retail appearance and displays a number of old toys and action figures. One walking by could easily be forgiven for thinking this is still a working antique toy shop.

And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street was one of Dr. Suess’ first books and, as if you needed yet another reason to believe in the power of persistence, was rejected by more than two dozen publishers before Suess found one who would publish it. I have no idea what path these action figures took to arrive in an old store window on Detroit Street. But if some little kid saw it and then went home and told his father that he’d seen the Queen of England wave at Nipper, the RCA Victor dog, I bet he’d stuff a bar of soap in that boy’s mouth for lying and send him to bed without supper.

A River Runs Through It

2012-02-15T06:00:00.002-05:00

Sunrise on the James River, 2012
(Click to see larger)

Sometimes a camera phone is an acceptable substitute for a good camera. But sometimes, like the other morning in Richmond, it just wasn’t enough.

I didn't have my "good camera" with me. The trip was all business, starting early in the morning and going late into the night for two days. I hadn’t expected to have time for pictures and, to be honest, I should have been getting a little more sleep instead of getting up to watch the sun rise. But my eyes weren't completely closed to photo opportunities. The morning's sunrise on the James River, too, was too gorgeous to miss.

I lived in Richmond from 1970 until early 1983. This was a time when many cities were still ignoring the rivers at their doorsteps. Where you see modern buildings in this picture was mostly scrub woods and parking lots when I was there.

To get to the river in downtown Richmond in those days you had to be prepared to break the law. The riverfront was nearly all private property. You had to cross railroad tracks and trestles and get across the remnants of the Kanawha Canal. Railroad police were especially vigorous in prosecuting those who trespassed in their right of ways.

The Kanawha Canal is an interesting feature of Richmond’s riverfront. George Washington surveyed and designed the canal, which during the 1700s and 1800s carried goods and people from the western part of the state to its final lock in the eastern end of downtown Richmond. Because the geological “fall line” that marks the transition from “upland” Virginia to the flatter coastal plains runs just east of Richmond, the James River is mostly rocky rapids as it plunges through downtown Richmond on its way to the wider and calmer waters just east of town. Even on its calmest days, the rapids can be extremely dangerous.

When I lived in Richmond, it looked as if nothing had been done to the Kanawha Canal since Washington’s time. Where you could locate sections of the canal you would find rusty and leaking locks, sunken boats, discarded industrial machinery, abandoned vehicles and trees growing out of the canal bottom. When there were problems at the city’s wastewater treatment plant, just up river, raw sewage would occasionally be dumped into the canal.

Today, Richmond embraces its riverfront. Sections of the Kanawha Canal have been cleaned and restored and are now among the city’s most popular tourist attractions.

There aren’t many office buildings in this scene because most of the modern downtown was built well uphill from what you can see here. Richmonders are still wary of the river. Even after a robust floodwall was built, developers are leery of getting too close to the still occasionally wild river.

I had higher hopes for this picture because it was the first time I’d seen this view from an elevated perspective. This picture was made using the Photosynth app I mentioned the other day. I wish the quality were better because the transition from the brighter sky of the east to the darker sky of the west displayed a richer spectrum of colors than can be seen here and set off the moon a lot better. A better camera would have captured more of the subtlety of those colors.

Sometimes a phone camera can be an acceptable substitute. But when your memory holds a much richer memory of the moment, all the camera phone picture does is drive you crazy at the thought of what could have been.

New Yorkers and Their Bridges

2012-02-14T06:00:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn Bridge, 2012

Anyone who’s ever visited coastal Virginia knows that water’s a big part of our life here. This is not just because there are so many bodies of water, but also because you have to go over or under water to get just about anywhere.

The traditional solution to this challenge has been to build trestle-and-tunnel systems. Bridges have always been problematic because they’d have to be tall enough to allow the tallest Navy ships and commercial vessels to pass underneath at high tide. Turns out the Navy’s never had a prohibition on bridges around here. But it remains that there is only one other metropolitan place in the world that has as many underwater highway tunnels as our area.

To have a lot of tunnels doesn’t mean things don’t get congested. All it takes is flat tire or minor accident to block a tunnel for hours. Just the other afternoon westbound traffic headed to our busiest bridge-tunnel was stopped and backed up for the better part of twelve miles.

I think about this whenever I visit New York. It’s not like their traffic flows smoothly. But you have to admit that New York gives you some pretty majestic bridges to look at while you’re waiting in traffic. Most were the visions of just a few men—most notably the enterprising wire spinner John Roebling and the empire builder Robert Moses—who had the financial support or political power (or both) to build bridges on an immense scale. Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge is an undeniable part of New York’s character. Moses connected boroughs with bridges that are, if nothing else, immense.

Compared to the bridges where I live, a number of the New York area bridges are downright artful. Driving across the Verrazano Bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn can be like, and sometimes is, driving into a cloud. The marriage of stone and steel in the Brooklyn Bridge is awe-inspiring, and doubly so for having been designed to accommodate pedestrians as well as vehicles. The engineering that went into these bridges showed people all over the world how to build bridges on a big scale.

The picture below shows part of the approach to the Manhattan Bridge. Can you imagine anyone building such a classically influenced bridge these days?

Manhattan Bridge Approach, 2012

By the way, Leon Moisseiff, who designed the Manhattan Bridge, would also go on to design the famous “galloping Gertie” Tacoma Narrows Bridge that twisted and vibrated and eventually collapsed into Puget Sound just five months after it was built.

Another of my favorite bridges in the George Washington Bridge, which spans the Hudson River between New Jersey and upper Manhattan. It’s a magnificent testament to the strength and majesty of steel engineering. A few years ago I learned an interesting thing about the George Washington Bridge; namely, that it was originally intended to be clad in stone. But the steel frame was so popular when the bridge opened that it was decided to leave the structure exposed. Again, imagine anyone making such a decision in our time.

No one around here, that’s for sure. But what would you expect of people who prefer to do their driving under water?

Manhattan Bridge Detail, 2012

Winter Passing Through

2012-02-13T06:00:00.001-05:00

Snow Day, 2010

Winter finally arrived the other night. It’s been flirting with us since fall. But just when you'd think it was getting into full swing there'd instead be a week of t-shirt weather. Go figure.

But when winter finally showed up for real this past Saturday afternoon it made sure it's appearance would not go unnoticed. Great gusts of wind came up. There were deep, percussive booms of thunder. What had been a day of occasional drizzle became sleet and then snow and then a swirling blizzard.

We were out at dinner with friends when the storm hit its peak. The restaurant was full of people arriving for reservations running up against people who didn't want to surrender their tables just yet lest they have to go out into the storm.

But it didn't last long. Snow rarely does here. In my youth it would snow in the morning, turn to slush by early afternoon and wash away by evening.

And that's pretty much how it was Saturday night. The snow was falling and the wind was swirling when we went into the restaurant. But by the time we left water was flowing across the parking lot and the maître d was pronouncing the onset of the spring thaw.

An Unexpected Moment of Elegance

2012-02-10T06:00:00.001-05:00

Looking Up in Dumbo, 2012

I’ve been traveling for a couple of days. The mind’s overloaded with client-related stuff, leaving little room for recreational thinking. So we’ll close the week with this view of a little half moon, some warm incandescent light and a rich blue sky, all spied jut before sunset one day last week in Brooklyn, New York.

There’s not much story to this. I was walking down the street toward the East River, fascinated by the view ahead, the skyline of Manhattan on the opposite shore and the people around me. Then, for reasons unknown, I stopped to look up and become briefly mesmerized by this wonderful little slice of nature’s glory. I just stood there for a moment before it occurred to me to lift the camera to my eye.

When I finally did that and returned to my walk, I found a half dozen or so people standing around me, so puzzled by my stance and head turned high that they’d, too, looked to the sky to see what mysteries it held. It was like that moment in the movie The Fisher King when all at once a thousand unrelated people hurrying across main hall of Grand Central Terminal coalesce into one grand waltz. Don’t remember the scene? It’s one of my favorite movie moments of all time. Here is it.

If you’re a real nerd about Terry Gilliam films, you can see him describe the thinking and production behind the Grand Central sequence here.

Every Window Tells a Story

2012-02-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

Every Window Tells a Story, 2012

I figure every window in this picture’s got a story. (Or as Rod Stewart put it, every picture’s got a story.) The muse is evading me at the moment, though. So we’re going to have to work together to draw from this picture whatever stories there are to be told about these windows.

Let’s start at the top.

It seems safe to say that the lady who lives in the apartment at the top left, the one with the curtains neatly tied back, is so neat and tidy that she probably avoids the hallways when she hears the man next door. I mean, really. Who wants to be around a man—he probably smells—who’s got a big hole in the glass in one window (the one beside the fire escape) and another in which he can’t seem to figure out to manipulate the Venetian blinds?

Maybe this same lady invites her widowed friend from downstairs, the one who lives in the apartment with the plants in the window and has no air conditioner, to come up on hot summer afternoons to have a bowl of ice cream and watch South American midget wrestling on the satellite television. The lady from downstairs can afford neither an air conditioner nor a satellite dish. The lady upstairs means well, but her repeated mentions of how comfortable the window air conditioner makes the apartment and how her son who lives out on Long Island is so nice to pay for the satellite dish just sounds like so much bragging after a while.

The retired couple in the lowest apartment we can see on the left is obviously scared of break-ins. Why else would they have that metal screen over the window by the fire escape? They probably like the young lady who lives in the apartment next to them, the one with the window at the bottom right. But does she have to bring so many men home with her at night? And do the kids that hang around the bodega downstairs have to play that music so loud? And what about their own son, Mister Big Shot works on Wall Street and lives in Manhattan? Would it kill him to pick up the phone and call his mother once in a while?

Speaking of Rod Stewart, I was a fan in his early days. But then one snowy Sunday in 1971 I was getting a ride with a friend back to college after visiting my girlfriend at her college across the state when we happened to stop at the all-girls Hollins College for the driver to enjoy what turned out to be an extended afternoon and evening of bliss with an old flame. I didn’t want to sit out in the cold car, so I went looking for someplace warm to hang out and found a girl I knew slightly. She invited me to wait in her room, but didn’t want to do anything but play cards and listen to music. The only record she had was Rod Stewart’s then new “Every Picture Tells a Story,” which I figure we must have listened to in its entirely at least 11 times. As far as I’m concerned, that’s more Rod Stewart than anyone should have to endure in a lifetime, no matter what he says about pictures telling stories.

New York Real Estate Report

2012-02-08T06:00:00.001-05:00

New on 29th, 2012

Evolutionary biologists tell us that sustainable systems never stand still. They’re always changing, whether we notice it or not.

A city is a living system made up of millions of interconnected pieces, people and shared understandings that make it work. Few American cities are as dynamic as New York, where every year tens of thousands of people arrive from all over the world in search of opportunity. It’s joked that the most popular topic of conversation among New Yorkers is real estate. Who got that good apartment on the sixth floor? Did they really get a working fireplace for $2,400 a month?

Unlike in Los Angeles, where I’ve heard of people who drive three and four hours each way to get to and from work from some distant arid valley, most New Yorkers like to stay within reach of Manhattan. That means they’re constantly keeping their eyes out for the next affordable place. It appears that the new “next affordable place” is Long Island City, located in the most southern part of Queens.

During our brief visit to New York last week we stayed in a relatively new hotel in Long Island City. Until a few years ago Long Island City was a pretty hardscrabble industrial area. But that’s all changing. In their quest to create housing for all those people coming to New York, developers are replacing empty industrial buildings with shiny new high rises full of million dollar condos and apartments. (The ones closet to the river do have, I’ll admit, million dollar views of Manhattan.) They tout Long Island City as:

“Cutting-edge. Vibrant. Dynamic....the Next Big Thing. Populated with artists, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and innovative small businesses, a forward-thinking approach to life.”

I don’t know many artists who could afford to live in such places as are being built in Long Island City. The mood is definitely more BMW than beatnik. And I hesitate to apply that description to the block shown above.

Most people might scratch their heads at the thought of someone paying top dollar to live in an extremely skinny apartment in this neighborhood. (I was advised by a hotel employee not to walk on the street after dark.) But apparently that’s not how developers think. A developer saw an empty narrow lot and went for it.

I’m disappointed that the designer of this building shows no respect for its surroundings. And despite the attempt to gussy up an otherwise extremely narrow and plain box of a building with a little color and a curve in its façade, one has to wonder just how stylish it’s going to look five years from now when the soot from the nearby elevated trains and the 59^th Street Bridge settles onto those colorful exteriors that look more suited to Miami or Orlando than to New York.

I embrace change. But I don’t get what’s going on here. But maybe I’m just not ready for “the next big thing.”

Seeing Wide in Brooklyn

2012-02-07T06:00:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan, 2012

[You should be able to click on any of these images to enlarge them.]

Regular readers will recall that I always try to carry a camera with me. Sometimes it’s just the camera in my iPhone. The quality’s not terribly good—the newer iPhone cameras are much better—but it’ll do in a pinch.

Last week’s trip to New York didn’t allow any time for wandering. Mostly I would find myself with five or ten minutes while the ladies in my family finished their retail therapy.

That’s how I happened to find myself in down at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge Tuesday evening at sunset. A lot more people have moved into Dumbo, as the area’s known, since I was last there. There’s a trendy restaurant or two, a fancy green grocer, a Starbucks and a West Elm store. So I guess that means Dumbo’s officially gentrified.

It was a gorgeous clear afternoon. I wasn’t the only one taking advantage of the unseasonably warm temperature and setting sun to walk along the waterfront. I used my “good camera” to take the picture above. Then I thought to pull out the iPhone and use a new app you might enjoy playing with. It’s called Photosynth. It’s free, very easy to use, and it’s a great way to create simple panorama photographs. It stitches both horizontally and vertically and will even take the pictures for you if you follow its directions. So you can have a lot of fun with it.

Here’s the Manhattan Bridge, as interpreted by Photosynth through my iPhone camera.

Manhattan Bridge, 2012

Here (below) is another sample of Photosynth, and also an interesting statement on the evolution of the Greenpoint neighborhood. Greenpoint’s streets were always a mix of industrial and residential uses. There’s a stretch of Greenpoint Avenue, for example, where you can find a chicken slaughterhouse nestled in among a row of houses and apartment buildings.

On the street shown here, apartment and row houses are mixed in among a diverse array of warehouses and light industrial businesses. The flashy new building in the distant left in this photo is Viridian, a 137-unit luxury condo development in which Magic Johnson was a major investor. The building wasn’t quite finished when the real estate market tanked and the developers went bust. Now all the units are for rent. It’s one of those places where if you have to ask how much the rent is, you probably can’t afford it.

The building might look a little out of place in this low-rise working class neighborhood. But hey, the chicken slaughterhouse is just around the corner. Location, as they say, is everything.

Green Street, Greenpoint, 2012

Red Hook

2012-02-06T06:00:00.002-05:00

Van Dyke and Conover Streets, 2012

One of the things I like about cities like New York is that they’re so big that there’s always a new neighborhood to explore. I suspect, though, that most visitors to New York never get off the island of Manhattan except to go to the airport. They’re missing a lot when they do this.

Last week I had a chance to spend a few minutes taking pictures in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which those of us of a certain age will remember as the place where Marlon Brando bemoaned that he "could have been a contender” in On The Waterfront.

Prior to this visit, I’d only known Red Hook as the place you went through to get to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. So I was surprised to learn that Red Hook is one of the oldest neighborhoods of New York, having been settled by the Dutch in the 1600s. It’s location just inside the Verrazano Narrows, made Red Hook one of the most important shipping depots in New York, especially during the mid-1800s when Red Hook was the terminus of a vast inland shipping network that included the Erie Canal. Even into the 1920s Red Hook was said to be one of the world’s busiest ports.

Red Hook’s had its ups and downs since then. It’s a damp, low-lying area, exposed to the cold winds off upper New York Bay. It’s never had the status of neighborhoods located a little further uphill. During the Great Depression Red Hook was known for its sprawling “Hooverville” shantytown. In the 1990s Red Hook was called the “crack capital of America.”

Those who study the life of cities know that circumstances that make a place undesirable to some spell opportunity for others. Today Red Hook is home to a growing number of artists, writers and others who don’t mind trading sparse subway service for affordable real estate. Van Brunt Avenue is home to a growing number of hip shops and bars, including Baked.

A giant Ikea store sits by the waterfront adjacent to the Erie Basin. The Queen Mary II, too big to use the cruise ship piers on the Hudson River in Manhattan, now calls at Red Hook. MTV’s Real World Brooklyn season was filmed in a converted warehouse in Red Hook.

The Real World and the Queen Mary II aren’t the things that will draw me back to Red Hook, though. Rather, I’ll want to go find those last remnants of the old industrial port that gave Red Hook its color. Maybe I’ll have more than five minutes to look around next time.

Still More Fashion Insight

2012-02-03T06:00:00.003-05:00

Manhattan Avenue, 2012

I really hadn’t intended for What I Saw to become a showcase of cutting edge fashion. But I know many of you reading this are women who at least like to know what’s going on. So here’s another quick guide to what the finer ladies will be wearing this spring.

I took this picture the other day in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. A lot of people don’t know that Brooklyn’s bigger and has a larger and far more diverse population than Manhattan. For many years Greenpoint has been a very tight Polish neighborhood. Business signs are in Polish. The shops are full of groceries and dry goods from brands you’d never find anywhere but here or, say, the older Polish neighborhoods of Buffalo, Cleveland or Chicago.

Documentation, 2003

One of my favorite storefronts on Manhattan Avenue is a place called Marco Polo Nuda. From the window display and the line on the sign that reads “Something new from Italy,” I assume they sell clothing. I was intrigued by the exotic hint of "nuda," though. It turns out nuda means “boredom” in Polish. So I guess there’s an idiom involved that I just don’t understand.

Marco Polo Nuda, 2003

Greenpoint wasn’t always a Polish enclave. In the 1800s, it was an area of manufacturing and shipping. The ironclad warship Monitor was built at the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint. If you ever used a Eberhard Faber pencil it was probably made in Greenpoint.

These days, young hipsters and trust fund babies have spilled into Greenpoint from the adjacent Williamsburg neighborhood, driving up the rents and bringing with them hipster stores, artisanal cheeses, trendy bars, tiny coffee houses, vegan restaurants and bi-lingual signs. Former factories are becoming loft “residences” and blocks formerly made up of shingled row houses have been replaced by high rises full of multi-million dollar condos. The old pencil factory now houses artists, illustrators, architects, internet media and start-ups, and craftsmen. Along the East River is a sprawling reproduction of the 1920s-era Atlantic City boardwalk used for filming HBO’s Boardwalk Empire series.

Sorry for the digression. Back to fashion.

I have no idea how you’d categorize the styles in the window shown above. All I can say is that it seems to be a perfect metaphor for the changes taking place in Greenpoint. The cap on the lady’s head down at the bottom of the display case is all hipster. Ditto the denim skirt, scarf belt and tights. But the blue frilly things below the knees is all Polish, or maybe some kind of holdover from the disco era.

The window also reminds us that Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. I sure hope none of the ladies in my life see this before they open their presents.

Ship Shape

2012-02-02T06:00:00.000-05:00

Model of RMS Titanic, 2012

I suppose it could be seen as something of a cheap shot to talk about cruise ships so soon after the tragic deaths of so many people on the Costa Concordia. So don’t take what I’m about to say as being disrespectful.

I mentioned yesterday that I’d stopped in to the Bean There coffee house in the course of being out and taking some pictures the other day. It’s a nice place, convenient in the middle of downtown, congenial staff and a good place to meet friends or clients for a chat.

The owners of Bean There are supportive of local artists, writers and crafts people. So there’s interesting stuff on display. On Saturday afternoon a local poet was signing copies of her new book. You get the picture.

While stopping in at Bean There earlier in the week, I’d notice a bunch of ship models on display. I’m a big admirer of ship models. The Mariners Museum, located nearby in Newport News, Virginia, has an exquisite collection of ship models, including a cool group of models of transatlantic ocean liners. The model of the Queen Mary, for example, is thirty-three feet long and nine feet high. You can get a sense of the scale of some of these models from the photo below of an owner’s model of the old US Lines’ America. (The actual ship, by the way, lies in pieces scattered along the shore of one of the Canary Islands. The model, however, sails as proudly as the day she was launched at the Newport News Shipbuilding Corporation.)

USS America (model), 2003

But there was something different about these models at Bean There, including the one shown at the top of this post and several other replicas of US Navy ships. Their scale was exact and they were meticulously constructed. But it didn’t take an eagle eye to notice that there wasn’t a straight edge in any of them.

Ships have lots of curves in them. This wasn’t the problem. The thing that is out of the ordinary about these models is that they are made of duct tape stretched over corrugated cardboard.

I don’t know anything about the person who created these models. There are no other clues to his or her artistic intentions. It could have been a young person or an adult. Maybe a sailor stuck on a year-long deployment. These are complex models, after all. They weren’t built overnight, even if the keels do look broken on all of them. The matching of the exterior colors to the original colors of these ships is spot on. There’s even a penciled note on what the artist purports to be the Titanic’s “poop deck.”

Maybe the salvors working on the Costa Concordia ought to bring in some duct tape to patch up those ugly gashes along her hull.

Props

2012-02-01T06:00:00.001-05:00

Iced Tea on Granby Street, 2012

I wish I were better with props. Some people I know drag all sorts of props around with them when they’re out to paint or make photographs. One friend, for example, did a series of wonderful environmental portraits that included an old white chair.

Props don’t to have to be anything fancy. Just thinking about that chair makes me realize that it could be something as simple as a glass or a piece of ribbon or maybe even an old shoe or something else mundane that you would challenge yourself to make relevant in a series of photographs.

I, on the other hand, can hardly be counted on to get the tripod out of the car when I go out to take pictures. So the idea that I’m going to haul around a sack of toys, a handful of ribbons, an old shoe or a garden gnome to feature in my photographs is pretty silly. I’m an artist, after all. I work with what providence puts before me.

Yeah, right.

I was actually intrigued by my friend’s chair series. And would it kill me to throw a piece of colorful ribbon or some other portable prop in the back of the car? You never know what’s going to trigger inspiration. Maybe having that ribbon will do it.

As for the photo above, this is more a case of a prop getting in the way. I’d been walking around downtown Norfolk for an hour and stopped at a hipster coffee house to get a glass of tea so that I could…okay, I bought it so that I could use the coffee house’s bathroom without feeling guilty.

When you’ve paid almost three bucks for a tall iced tea (and a clean bathroom) you don’t want to just toss the tea out. So I carried it on my walk, where liquid refreshment notwithstanding, it became a nuisance. When I’d stop to take a picture I needed both hands on the camera. I’d set the plastic cup on the back of a car or on a planter or down on the sidewalk. In this particular moment the closest thing was a pair of parking meters. (I have no idea why I thought they’d be cleaner than the sidewalk.) I nestled the ice tea between the two meters and set about to take the picture I wanted. Then I turned around and noticed that while there’s nothing remarkable about this scene, the color of the tea, the reflection of light off the meters and the brick sidewalk in the distance made for a calm confluence of soft colors.

I’m going to have to think about this prop thing. Suggestions anyone?

Art isn't easy. But come on!

2012-01-31T06:00:00.002-05:00

Marjorie’s Porch, 2012

A month or so ago I mentioned the new Annie Leibovitz book, “Pilgrimage," a collection of photographs of the homes, working places and belongings of famous people who are deceased. In an interview when the book was released Leibovitz talked about how difficult it was making photographs that capture the essence of people without showing the people. In my blog post I expressed amazement that such an accomplished photographer could be surprised by this challenge.

After that, I thought my curiosity about the book and Leibovitz’ comment had been sated. But now the plot thickens. Leibovitz has donated a set of prints from the book to the Smithsonian Institution. This is a wonderful and generous gift to “America’s Attic,” as the Smithsonian is sometimes called, and as a seasoned PR person might note, a wonderful way for Leibovitz to begin restoring a reputation tarnished by media attention to her embarrassing financial problems.

An Associated Press account of the Smithsonian gift and the exhibit of the photographs noted that Leibovitz is “still learning about new technology and about herself.” The account goes on to make it sound as if Ms. Leibovitz was waging a great and risky artistic battle in taking on this photographic project.

The same AP story quoted the dean of one of the nation’s prestigious schools of art and design dean saying, “Leibovitz is presenting cultural history in a new way…She's trying to convey a sense of people without the people actually being there in front of the camera…bushwhacking through our cultural legacy and figuring it out as she went along."

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All I can say is that art school deans must live very sheltered lives. Elliot Erwitt took one of the most famous photographic portraits of all times in 1955—and also one where the subject is not present—when he photographed Pablo Casals’ cello in the great master’s home. The picture’s an icon of Twentieth Century photographic portraiture.

Casal’s Cello, by Elliot Erwitt, 1955

Heck, on any day of the week on Flickr one can find many fine examples of amateur and professional photographers “presenting cultural history in a new way” and, as I see it, recording the meaningful and meaningless ephemera of daily life in this world. And I’ll bet none of them would cop to the pretention of describing their work as “bushwhacking.”

Art isn’t easy, or at least that’s what Georges Seurat says in Stephen Sondheim’s “Sundays in the Park with George.” Sometimes it takes incredible perseverance to capture or birth the image you want. But for crying out loud, let’s not make it into brain surgery. There’s all that actual bushwhacking to be done in the woods behind my house and I can’t be worrying about it when I’m out taking pictures.

As for Marjorie’s Porch (above), if you knew Marjorie you wouldn’t have to see her in this picture to know it’s her porch.

One Less Worry

2012-01-30T06:00:00.002-05:00

Swee Pea, 1981

My 91 year-old mother, who has at least for the moment tilted back from death’s doorstep, is getting to be one for surprises.

When I walked into her room at the nursing home the other day she looked up and announced that she’d been thinking about having a baby, but had decided against it.

Now, I don’t know how you handle an older person with dementia. I’ve learned, though, it’s best not to dispute such comments as this, no matter how outrageous they might be. Rather, I just play along in the hope of enticing a little more conversation. So instead of pointing out several obvious obstacles to this conception, I merely answered, “That’s interesting. Why did you decide that?”

A response like this will usually leave my mother a little confused. Just enough time will have elapsed between the time she says something and the time I respond—really, this happens in less than a minute—that she’ll have completely forgotten what we were talking about and instead chuckle at the realization of yet another lost thought. This happens a lot.

But this time my mother instead looked at me as if I had three ears. “Well can’t you see?” she snapped back at me. “I’m in my nineties!”

I should mention that since she entered her eighties my mother has relished the idea that she is the oldest person around and should therefore be accorded the attention and respect given to, say, visiting royalty. It only upsets her when I point out that there are several people right down the hall from her who are more than one hundred years old and who are up and walking and feeding themselves and anxious to get out and go places.

Anyway, we had a chuckle at the silliness of my comment and continued on to another conversation. I stuck around for a little while, checking laundry and tending to a potted plant in the window. I thought the whole baby thing was over. But just as I was preparing to leave, she looked up from her bed with an air of contempt and said, “So I guess that means I wouldn’t be able to count on you to babysit?”

No Homemade Pies Today

2012-01-27T06:30:00.000-05:00

Homemade Pies, 2012

One of the sad things about photographing old places is that when you go back again some of the places you photographed before will be gone. Or closed, as is the case with the bakery above.

I first photographed this bakery in 2003. It probably had a name, but I never knew what it was. I was photographing the church across the street and looked over and noticed people coming and going from the bakery. Once I noticed it I also noticed that sweet smell that hovers around bakeries.

I’ve been back to the neighborhood on a number of occasions since that time. But it was only this past Saturday that I happened to walk by the old bakery and discover that it had closed several years ago.

It looks like all the equipment a baker would need to re-open the place is still in place. Even the glass display cases looks no more than a little dusty for having been last wiped in 2009. The signs touting “Homemade Pies” and “Best Coffee in Town” are still in the window. It’s not a big place. Lots of people live nearby. You’d think someone could make a go of it.

But the truth is this is probably not a neighborhood that can support an artisanal baker selling $9 loaves of bread. So the bakery will probably join the list of other businesses—the grocery store, the book store, the bike shop and so on—that were once a lively part of the social fabric of this neighborhood but now serve no one. There are no homemade pies today and the coffee urn is cold.

Bakery, 2012

Closed, 2012

Free to Shoot

2012-01-26T06:30:00.001-05:00

Bistro Vivienne (at mig cover) , 2006

It’s funny. There are places I know not to be casual about taking pictures, or at least not to be conspicuous when taking pictures. You don’t get close to or take close-up pictures of U.S. Navy ships. Airports security people are touchy, too. Some museums don’t allow the taking of pictures. You don’t take pictures inside retail stores.

The military stuff is defense-related. I figure the museums are just trying to get you to buy art cards in the gift shop. The retail stores, on the other hand, are concerned about industrial espionage, which is a fancy way of saying that retailers don’t want their competitors taking pictures of their store layout, displays, merchandise, prices, employees and all the other kinds of “intellectual property” that make up the art of their retailing. This might seem inconsequential. After all, you’re not photographing something that isn’t already being viewed by thousands of shoppers every day. But seeing something and making a photographic record of it are two different things.

You get the picture; you have to be mindful not just of what there is to photograph, but where you’re doing the photographing. It never occurs to a lot of people who are new to photography that a lot of the places where you might see things you want to photograph are private property.

Most businesses are pretty reasonable if they realize you’re not trying to be unlawful. But some are. A friend who recently carried his camera into a local mall was asked to leave because, so the security guy said, “our store managers are complaining.” There’s an antiques shop in Smithfield, Virginia, that asked me to leave after I tried to take a picture of a window display I’d admired. Last summer a private security guard intercepted me on a public street in front of the New York headquarters of JP Morgan Chase and told me I couldn’t take pictures of the building.

I mention all of this because there are other places, many of them commercial, where I don’t think twice about taking pictures. It almost never occurs to me to give a second’s thought to taking pictures in restaurants, though when you think about it they ought to be just as concerned as retailers are about their competitors coping them. The picture above, for example, was taken in a restaurant in Paris.

This past Saturday I had lunch in a pizza place in Portsmouth, Virginia. It’s a small place. There were other people dining when we walked in. I saw a few interesting photo angles and started taking pictures without it occurring to me that anyone would have a problem with it. (The other diners wondered what I was doing, but didn’t object and weren’t, in any event, in view.) It was the old guy with the gray hair who wouldn’t get out of the way.

Portsmouth 42, 2012

Portsmouth 54, 2012

Rainy Day Lines

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

Scott’s Creek 13, 2012

This past Saturday was cold and rainy. It’s easy on days like this to just roll over in bed and catch a few more winks, or get up and read by the fireplace. This past Saturday, though, I instead decided to get out and take some pictures. That’s the attitude you’re supposed to have if you’re a halfway diligent photographer. Photographs don’t take themselves and light and weather conditions wait for no man (or woman).

Besides, rainy days are great for certain kinds of outdoor photography. The even light of a rainy day can be great for photographing things that have detail that gets lost in the contrast on a sunny day

Rainy days also beg black-and-white. In the old days black-and-white was the default, your starting point. Now you simulate it digitally after you’ve taken the picture “in color.”

By late morning I found myself at the end of Constitution Avenue in Portsmouth, looking at some of the old piers on Scott’s Creek that have been heaved around by storms and ice. The combination of gray sky, marine timber lifted asunder and water made for some greats lines.

Scott’s Creek 17, 2012

Scott’s Creek 20, 2012

Where You Least Expect Them

2012-01-24T06:00:00.001-05:00

Cow, 2012

A friend who’s recently taken a greater interest in photography commented to me the other day that this new interest has made him much more cognizant of his surroundings. This comment was a bit surprising to me because the aspiring photographer is also an illustrator who, when he isn’t tilting at windmills with his editorial cartoons, is thought to be a pretty observant person already.

In any event, unless you’re one of those photography enthusiasts who just wants to fiddle with dials and argue over f-stops, photography’s all about noticing things.

It’s not like pictures just reveal themselves to you. No, I’ll take that back. I have met people who only take pictures at official “scenic overlooks” where some expert has previously determined that “approved pictures” can be taken.

I’m not one of those people. Rest assured, too, I would never argue with you about f-stops. And as for taking pictures at Scenic Overlooks, I’m one of those people whose car will be pulled over to the side of road blocking traffic somewhere farther up the mountain where you’re not even supposed to park if that’s what it takes to get a more interesting picture.

Unless you’re one of those tortured souls who’s got some original artistic message to get out into the world through the eye of a camera or you’re doing this for a living, the whole idea of photography is to have fun. The neat thing is that you can have fun every day because there are opportunities for pictures everywhere.

Don’t believe me? I had to take something to the city dump a few weeks ago. Taking something to the dump isn’t as easy as it used to be. At the outer gate, they check your driver’s license to make sure you’re actually a resident of the city. Then you have to go to another area where you drive onto a truck scale to assure another attendant that you’re not dumping off a load of radioactive anvils. Then you’re directed to yet another shed further down the road where they assess exactly what it is you have to dispose.

Eventually you find yourself further down the road in a place so muddy and desolate that it looks like something out of Mad Max or maybe a place where the thugs in a Guy Richie film would take someone who couldn’t pay his gambling debt to be eaten by feral pigs.

Speaking of farm animals, just as I was finally headed to the section of the dump where they accept old tires, I happened to look over toward the landfill and find this cow.

At first I marveled at how out-of-place this plastic cow was in its carefully mowed circle at the side of a landfill. But then I grabbed my phonecam and chuckled at the realization that this was just another example of how there are picture opportunities even where you least expect them if you keep your eyes open.

Birds do it, bees do it

2012-01-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

Let’s Do It! 2012

Even educated fleas do it

Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.

I’ve long been a fan of Cole Porter’s songs and lyrics. To call them standards sells them short. They’re classics, institutions even. You have to admit the man was gifted. Years ago some people I knew from college created a showcase of Porter called “Red, Hot and Cole.” There was talk that it would make its way to Broadway. But I gather the serendipity of the entertainment world—deals, options, financing, stars, New York, LA, etc.—prevented that from ever happening. Still, it was a great show.

Since songs like Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) were intended for the stage—Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) was written in 1928 for a musical and used again in another musical and after that a motion picture—and since revivals make up so much of the Broadway musical lineup these days, it doesn’t take much of a leap of faith to envision an updated Cole Porter review back on Broadway.

But something tells me Porter would have never expected to find the line Let’s Do It! on a banner in front of a Southern Baptist church in Portsmouth, Virginia. Given the context, one assumes this is a call to faith. Maybe the person who had this idea didn’t even know about Cole Porter—Southern Baptists being a bit shy around songs suggestive of It—and was instead trying to channel a little of the directness of Nike’s Do It.

All I know is that I had a hard time stifling a giggle when I saw this banner in front of the church. I guess my mind was just trolling in the gutter.

Free Love, 2012

I’ll give it to the folks at this church, tough. They’re a generous lot. The day I took this picture they were having a free yard sale. They were also—and, again, maybe I’m getting this all wrong—pushing free love.

Let’s let Porter’s lyrics play us out.

And that's why birds do it, bees do it

Even educated fleas do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love

Cold Cape Cod clams, 'gainst their wish, do it

Even lazy jellyfish do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love

I've heard that lizards and frogs do it

Layin' on a rock

They say that roosters do it

With a doodle and cock

Some Argentines, without means do it

I hear even Boston beans do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love

When the little bluebird

Who has never said a word

starts to sing Spring spring spring

When the little bluebell

At the bottom of the dell

Starts to ring Ding ding ding

When the little blue clerk

In the middle of his work

Starts a tune

The most refined lady bugs do it

When a gentleman calls

Moths in your rugs they do it

What's the use of moth balls

The chimpanzees in the zoos do it,

Some courageous kangaroos do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love

I'm sure sometimes on the sly you do it

Maybe even you and I might do it

Let's do it, let's fall in love.

Excerpts from Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love), 1928 by Cole Porter

What the Engineer Saw

2012-01-20T06:00:00.002-05:00

The Engineer’s Cab, 2012

Finishing out this week of railway-themed images is this shot (above) of the engineer’s cab on the locomotive I explored last weekend.

A switch engine is a small locomotive, meant for moving cars around a switch yard or short line. This particular yard locomotive was built in Schenectady, New York, in 1925 by the American Locomotive Company. Judging by all the different colors on this locomotive, my guess is that it served more than a few railroads before ending on an desolate siding in Virginia Beach.

I’ve always been amazed that locomotive engineers’ cabs have been located at the back of locomotives rather than at the front. Seems like they’d want to be able to see everything in front of them rather than having to peek around either side of a long locomotive engine. But I guess this dates from the days when you had to have an engineer and a couple of strong crewmen at the back of the engine to shovel coal from a second car into the engine stove. By the time diesel electric trains came along no such stoking was required. But the design stuck and continues today with modern long haul railroad locomotives.

Alco Yard Locomotive, 2012

Another thing that struck me about this locomotive was that it has amazingly simple controls. There are two horizontal steel bars—presumably a throttle and a brake—and a crank wheel (like you’d see on the end of an old hand brace drill) that pivot on a sturdy steel pillar. The control box is about the size of a medicine cabinet and has just a few buttons, dials and gauges, considering the complexity of the diesel electric engine. There’s also a large, vertically mounted wheel at the rear of the cab that I’m thinking might have been used to open and close the coupling link that attaches the locomotive to other cars.

The more I think about it, maybe two steel bars are enough. A locomotive engineer has only two choices: which direction to go in and how fast to go there. As far as directions go, there are only two choices: forward or backward. Everything else is pretty much determined by the layout of the track.

As a photographic subject, this locomotive would have been easier to photograph on an overcast day. As it was, the high midday sun made for a lot of contrast. Getting a clean exposure of the outdoors as well as the detail of the interior of the cab was a challenge, achieved only with a little cheating.

What the Engineer Saw, 2012

Operating Instructions

2012-01-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

Do Not Hump, 2012

I don’t begin to know all you’d have to know to operate a train. Old-fashioned featherbedding notwithstanding, almost every job is important and carries a lot of responsibility. It’s probably hard for some young people today to imagine the role railroads once played in creating upward social mobility in America. Becoming a train driver was once one of the most prestigious jobs to which a working class guy could aspire. Becoming a Pullman conductor or Dining Car cook or waiter had the same meaning for young African American men.

These guys were professionals. They were proud of their work and knew what to do. Everyone else got reminders.

There are safety instructions all over rail cars, though as the photo above demonstrates, some might seem off-color at first blush.

“Humping,” it turns out, refers to a surprisingly simple and efficient method used to sort freight cars. A yard locomotive pushes a string of cars to the top of an incline (the “hump”). On the other side of the incline the rail splits into lots of individual tracks on which trains are assembled. A worker in a nearby tower activates switches, the car is uncoupled and given a nudge over the top of the incline. Gravity pulls it down the other side and onto the right track.

Think Safe, 2012

“Think Safe” and “Home Safe” are a little easier to figure out. They’re two parts of a famous Norfolk & Western Railway safety slogan that goes “Think Safe. Work Safe. Home Safe.”

Home Safe, 2012

Art is Everywhere

2012-01-18T06:00:00.001-05:00

Little Creek 12, 2011

When I’m out taking pictures I frequently become so occupied looking at little details of what I’m photographing that I sometimes forget to take establishing shots of the big picture.

Such was the case with the 1925 yard locomotive I saw the other day. I didn’t think an establishing shot of the whole locomotive was very interesting. But the locomotive was full of all kinds colors and patterns that make up little moments.

Little Creek 78, 2011

Little Creek 35, 2011

Little Creek 77, 2011

Like Finding Family

2012-01-17T06:00:00.003-05:00

Sidelined, 2012

I don’t make a habit of trespassing. Okay, that’s a lie. I don’t know any halfway serious photographer who hasn’t trespassed once or twice to get a good picture. So there was no way I was going to leave the open door of an abandoned railroad car uninvestigated.

If I get called to court I’m going to call it entrapment and blame it all on my friend Walt. If he hadn’t told me about his friends who were out painting by the old southern terminus of the Eastern Shore Railway, I wouldn’t have been exposed to this temptation. Instead, I was up to my knees in weeds snooping around a string of abandoned railroad cars.

Among them were a couple of railroad cars that had once been used to move construction, repair and wreck recovery teams around the line. If a section of track was being replaced or repaired, cars like these would be stationed along a siding to provide on-site support. There’d be an office car, a dining car, a sleeper or two and specialize cars for cranes and other equipment.

The first car I went in was an old crew dining car. The glass in the windows had been replaced with sheets of plywood. The floor was so fragile that a single misstep would have dumped me onto the ground below. I dared not step too far into it.

Crew Dining Car, 2012

The other car was an old Norfolk & Western Railway office car. It contained seating, a conference table and chairs and a galley kitchen. Regulatory paperwork posted on the wall indicates that the car was in service until at least 1990.

A brief digression: In 1984 I had a chance to go on the old cruise ship USS United States. She’d been taken out of service abruptly and mothballed for fifteen years. The day I went aboard, though, it looked as if the crew had just stepped away. There were unfinished letters to family members on desks. The chef had already posted the menu for the crew’s dinner. The ship’s official logs were still on a shelf behind the helm.

I was reminded of that visit to the United States while walking through this old office car. Piles of paperwork, maps and other ephemera were all over the place. It looked like a crew of railroad workers had just left the place and a strong wind had rearranged all their papers.

Office Car, 2012

But that wasn’t the big thing.

Another digression: When I was little, my father was the VP of sales for a small railway called the Atlantic & Danville. In 1962 the A&D was acquired by the N&W and renamed The Norfolk, Franklin and Danville Railway Company.

The NF&D hasn’t existed for decades. But here on this old abandoned office car on a siding in Virginia Beach was a trove of NF&D history. Stacks of blank freight invoices, envelopes, weight records, maintenance schedules, bridge repair reports and all sorts of other forms were all over the place. I can honestly say I hadn’t thought one minute about the NF&D since my father worked there in the 1960s. But here was enough unused material that you probably could outfit a whole new railroad if you wanted without having to order any paper forms (so long as you wanted your railway to be called The Norfolk, Franklin and Danville).

I may trespass occasionally to get a good picture. But generally speaking I never destroy property and I never take anything except for my pictures. But on this occasion you’ll have to forgive me for taking one of the old NF&D envelopes.

NF&D Invoice Envelope, 2012