After a several month hiatus — illness, the hottest New York summer ever, time out to make a little money doing something else — I got back to work on the New York in Plain Sight clean-up a couple of weeks ago — shooting corners I'd missed the first time around (and sometimes even the second), reshooting a few that just weren't good enough, reshooting some that I'm sure I'd already shot but for one reason or another can't find the files now, and redoing some complicated intersections just for the sake of validating the IDs and insuring that I had really got them all, and so on.
There weren't that many left to do, but it seemed like an enormous job — somehow the project has seemed to grow in size, or at least in the effort required to finish it, as I've gotten closer and closer to the end, so that even 100 photos seemed more daunting yesterday than 1,000 did at the outset four years and seven months ago.
(But not more daunting than 11,485, which is, I think, as good a count as I'm going to get for how many street corners there are on the island of Manhattan, at least according to my definition of a street corner — see some of the earlier posts on this blog for discussion.)
Anyway, yesterday afternoon, 3:59 PM, Tuesday, October 5, 2010, I shot what I believe to be the last of them.
Of course, if this project has taught me anything, it is that there are always a few more corners lurking somewhere that I haven't caught: an obscure alleyway, a stretch of "Marginal Street" (the default name for any roadway following along the shoreline), even a few that I've somehow still missed, despite endless list making, checking, and rechecking.
But it simply can't be many, at this point. A dozen? Not even (though this may be wishful thinking on my part).
So yesterday evening I began the processing and cataloging, still in progress this morning. I hope to finish up and get them all posted on the website — there are 179 of them, though a number of them do repeat corners already posted long ago — by the end of the day today or, if exhaustion sets in (I'm expecting it to show up anytime now), by sometime tomorrow.
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I suppose that this should be a cause for celebration on a grand scale, but what I actually feel is some combination of simple relief (finishing up the shooting has been hanging over my head for nearly four years now), let down (what do I do now that I don't have that hanging over my head?), and a vague sense of dread at realizing how much remains to be done, even with the photography finished, in order to bring the project to the eventual form that I sketched out for it nearly five years ago, before I even started shooting.
But let's not be too Eyoric about it: it is satisfying, despite all the problems, delays, frustrations, etc., to have gotten this far, however long it took.
... sh'hechianu, v'kimanu, v'higianu, laz'man hazeh.
There weren't that many left to do, but it seemed like an enormous job — somehow the project has seemed to grow in size, or at least in the effort required to finish it, as I've gotten closer and closer to the end, so that even 100 photos seemed more daunting yesterday than 1,000 did at the outset four years and seven months ago.
(But not more daunting than 11,485, which is, I think, as good a count as I'm going to get for how many street corners there are on the island of Manhattan, at least according to my definition of a street corner — see some of the earlier posts on this blog for discussion.)
Anyway, yesterday afternoon, 3:59 PM, Tuesday, October 5, 2010, I shot what I believe to be the last of them.
Of course, if this project has taught me anything, it is that there are always a few more corners lurking somewhere that I haven't caught: an obscure alleyway, a stretch of "Marginal Street" (the default name for any roadway following along the shoreline), even a few that I've somehow still missed, despite endless list making, checking, and rechecking.
But it simply can't be many, at this point. A dozen? Not even (though this may be wishful thinking on my part).
So yesterday evening I began the processing and cataloging, still in progress this morning. I hope to finish up and get them all posted on the website — there are 179 of them, though a number of them do repeat corners already posted long ago — by the end of the day today or, if exhaustion sets in (I'm expecting it to show up anytime now), by sometime tomorrow.
——————————————
I suppose that this should be a cause for celebration on a grand scale, but what I actually feel is some combination of simple relief (finishing up the shooting has been hanging over my head for nearly four years now), let down (what do I do now that I don't have that hanging over my head?), and a vague sense of dread at realizing how much remains to be done, even with the photography finished, in order to bring the project to the eventual form that I sketched out for it nearly five years ago, before I even started shooting.
But let's not be too Eyoric about it: it is satisfying, despite all the problems, delays, frustrations, etc., to have gotten this far, however long it took.
... sh'hechianu, v'kimanu, v'higianu, laz'man hazeh.
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