A brief note on "signs of change"

I just looked ahead through the next few miles of Tenth Avenue, that is, from 24th Street on up to 72nd Street, just to sort of get a "preview" of what I'll be looking at more closely in the coming days.

And found myself thinking about the "signs of change" that I'm watching for in this pass along the avenue.

Tenth Avenue & 21st Street, Northwest Corner

Certainly there are obvious signs, signs that you wouldn't miss even if you were from Ulan Bator and just visiting for the afternoon: buildings under construction, or being demolished, scaffolding, safety netting, and other equipment, windows boarded up or papered over, fresh paint or tuckpointing or obviously (?) new facades not in keeping with the character of the obviously (?) older buildings around them.

And as we saw, there was a lot of that in evidence on the Tenth Avenue corners between 13th Street and 23rd Street, though rather less of it as we got closer 23rd Street.

Then the less obvious signs: a chic home furnishings shop in a neighborhood where that is, or until recently was, an anomaly, if not altogether inconceivable; younger people with fashionably upscale dog breeds and an upscale veterinarian to service them in a neighborhood where previously dogs were mutts and took care of themselves without any veterinarian; people in fashionable business or casual attire in a what was for decades a strictly working class neighborhood, and so on.

Or as we might say, the visible signs of gentrification's invisible graces of class, status, power, education, and so on (I may be getting carried away here, but perhaps the exaggeration, if it is one, will get the point across).

Which does raise some questions:

1
where does a neighborhood begin and end? what are it's boundaries? how fluid are they?

2
more specifically, what are the visible signs of a neighborhood's being a neighborhood? in architecture, commerce, signage, street life, appearance of people on the street, maintenance and upkeep of the sidewalks and streets — clean or littered, freshly paved or pot-holed?

3
since neighborhoods change their character as well as their boundaries, what is the temporal extent of a neighborhood's character? (What is now the Upper West Side was initially rural, then a shanty town or series of shanty towns, then was "gentrified" in the 1880s-1890s, then slipped back again into disrepute, becoming a "slum" by mid-century, revived in part by the Lincoln Center "urban renewal" project, and now once again tremendously fashionable (and expensive).

This is a very crude estimator, but one could say, in the roundest of numbers, that each of these phases has covered on the order of 50 years, with the characteristic of each phase centered on, say, the middle twenty or thirty years, the time in between being "transitional."

I'm just shooting in the dark here, playing around with the notions in advance of really finding out what I might be talking about.

This isn't an entirely idle question, if we're concerned not only with how a neighborhood evolves but how people come to identify themselves as being from that neighborhood, and how people know when they've walked from their own neighborhood into another one, just by what they see (and hear and smell).

And if we're interested in how people "on the street" and "in the neighborhood" perceive change, then we would want to know what the time frame is in which the change is perceived.

And that depends on the time scale of memories — and the shared memories — of the people living in or working in or regularly coming to or passing through the neighborhood. Meaning, I suppose, that a neighborhood with high turnover of people is perceived by them "on average" on a shorter time scale than a neighborhood with a relatively stable population.

Of course, there would be, and are, different time scales operating simultaneously.


A bit of personal reminiscence

When I moved back into the city nearly twenty years ago, I lived in a fourth floor walk-up on 15th Street, just off Sixth Avenue, next to the old New York State National Guard Armory. It was a non-neighborhood, situated in between the Flatiron, Union Square, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village neighborhoods, with none of their amenities and none of their character either.

I was there for about nine years. When I moved in, the street, especially in front of the armory, which had a substantial overhang over the sidewalk on the south side of the street, was home to a lot of homeless people. Fourteenth Street, a block to the south, was still pretty sleazy, and Sixth and Seventh Avenues heading north were no great shakes either, at least for the first few blocks.

The renovations began (they'd probably already begun and I didn't know it because I wasn't there then): scaffolding went up around the big building on the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street along with signs advertising "luxury condominiums." Down the block on 15th Street going west a few landlords began to spruce up the facades of their buildings. Going east a chic tile shop appeared, and an upscale toy store. Rumor had it that the armory would be torn down for something else, a CostCo or whatever. Some of the old buildings on Sixth Avenue north of me were demolished, and similarly on Seventh Avenue, and new high rises began to go up.

I left when the noise from the demolition of the armory and the construction of the new building made living where I was impossible for me (I lived right next door).

I'm fairly often back in that neighborhood, and sometimes walk past the building where I used to live. No doubt the neighborhood has changed enormously since I moved there. And is still changing, though the pace has slowed since the start of the depression now already nearly two years ago or more.

Now some of these changes were unmistakable: the demolition of the armory took over a year and the building was so large (it faced both 14th Street on the south and 15th on the north and was about half a block long) was the most striking — and then the construction of its replacement took another couple of years.

So: huge, big, long, exceedingly visible (and, alas, audible).

Other changes were faster: repaving Sixth Avenue (overnight), Bed Bath & Beyond opening (months and months of signage before the actual opening), one of the second hand book store on 18th disappearing (with 30 day going out of business sale), and upscale paper shops moving in, and so on and on and on — it's a familiar story.

And no doubt a similar range of time frames when a neighborhood is in decline, which is to say, when it becomes more attractive to poorer people than had previously been its main demographic.

——————————


Not sure, as usual, where this is heading, but wanted to spend some time on these thoughts (and experiences, too).

There is a type of musical analysis developed a hundred years or so ago by Heinrich Schenker that, in essence (though I don't remember him ever expressing it this way himself) looks at the structure of a piece of (tonal) music as it works on three different time scales, or so to speak with "moving sonic windows" of different durations:

1
the actual notes we hear, or their concatenation into recognizable, unitary "figures" — the most immediate and short-term of the sonic "windows," which he called the "foreground";

2
an intermediate length "window" that more or less corresponds to what we keep in our "active memory" of the piece as we experience it (meaning, perhaps, the previous 10 or 20 measures and what we're predicting or anticipating for the next 5 or 10 — and constantly revising our expectations as the piece goes on) — he called this the "middle ground"; and

3
the longest window, which is defined by the whole piece itself, which he (notoriously) called the "Urlinie" — the primordial or fundamental line of the piece.

And continuing into a further digression, the wonderful essay from now 50-60 years ago (originally, I believe, a lecture at Darmstadt) by Karlheinz Stockhausen that posits and then explores the idea of a continuum between rhythm and pitch, i.e., the implications of a sliding scale of time frames or metrics.


And a further bit of an afterthought: is a look at "signs of change" actually a look at the overlay of nevertheless distinguishably different time frames? time frames that overlap, moreover, and modulate our shared experience — even our sharing of experience — of change in the city, if not elsewhere or even everywhere?

This evening, or tomorrow morning at the latest, back to the next segment of Tenth Avenue and its concrete signs of change, from 24th Street up to 34th Street.

Signs of change on Tenth Avenue: 13th Street – 23rd Street (2006)

A frequent failing of mine: trying to do too much all at once. Already, going through the first 42 corners of Tenth Avenue, the laundry list of things to make and things to do that I posted yesterday seems like too much (though many are things I’d like to get to on subsequent passes — I’m a big fan of many simpler rather than fewer more complicated iterations).

Tenth Avenue & 17th Street, Southeast Corner

Howie Becker suggested I look for “signs of change” and since I’m always happy to get ideas wherever they come from I’ll latch onto that one fast!

(Twenty-some years ago the painter John Hultberg told me, vis-á-vis my own work as an artist, which he was critiqueing for me, that I shouldn’t ever worry about originality. “You can’t prevent it,” he said to me.)

So, let’s at least start this 2nd pass by looking for signs of change. — It’s not so many corners, let’s just run through them and say what they are (open a second window in your browser, and go to Tenth Avenue 13th — 110th to follow along, or else toggle back and forth between the blog and the photos using your browser's forward and back buttons).

I’ll take the corners of each intersection in the clockwise order NE, SE, SW, NW.

For this post, at least, I'll list every corner and what I found; in later posts I may just summarize the results, if listing everything seems more tedious than it's worth — we'll see.


13th Street

NE — typical blue paint of a construction or renovation site, though no work appears to be underway yet; derelict structure over sidewalk (it's an overhead conveyor with hooks to move meat — whole carcasses — from trucks into the packing house)

SE — scaffolding; construction fence (same blue); truck delivering large pipes; workmen



14th Street

NE — High Line freshly painted white on north side of street; old black still visible to right; Mobil station has new look to it

SE — construction fence (same blue as 13/SE), same derelict overhead conveyor structure as 13/NE; at this end of the block, vacant lot behind fence.

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress though brick work looks to have been cleaned fairly recently; "stucco" on ground floor definitely not original

NW — no obvious signs of change in progress except if you know that the brick bulding at the right rear was originally a Nabisco factory building



15th Street

NE — scaffolding

SE — High Line pillars freshly painted white on Mobil Station property, black/rust on left; again, Mobil Station looks new; ditto store fronts on left

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress, but banners for "Hudson River Park" betray recent origin of this "mini park"

NW — orange plastic construction netting on sidewalk, workman (?), caution sign



16th Street

NE — construction wall (brown this time) with signage for new condo building ("The Caledonia") going up behind it

SE — none

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress, but this is, again, the former Nabisco factory building

NW — sections of concrete Jersey barriers; also the recently painted brickwork



17th Street

NE — Red Rock West Saloon may be new (?) but Earth Restaurant is definitely new and not in keeping with style of old neighborhood

SE — vacant lot with signs of construction — must be "The Caledonia" seen advertised on the wall at 16/NE; upscale furnishings shop new to old building; dog (breed) not typical of old neighborhood either

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress, but "ghosts" of prior structural elements above windows to the right betray fairly recent renovation

NW — construction netting on High Line; some scaffolding there too



18th Street

NE — store fronts are newish on left; "La" Lunchonette is new neighborhood style; van on right is delivering new stuff apparently for new business

SE — Star Diner probably ancient (?) but restaurant next door is new neighborhood style

SW — construction netting on High Line

NW — construction netting on High Line; scaffolding on left



19th Street

NE — no obvious signs of change in progress, but restaurant, especially sidewalk table awnings definitely new neighborhood style

SE — vacant lot; construction visible at far left

SW — High Line scaffolding at far left

NW — none



20th Street

NE — construction; scaffolding; signage for new building

SE — no obvious sign of change in progress, but Cookshop is definitely new neighborhood style

SW — none

NW — none



21st Street

NE — none except (maybe) recently cleaned brickwork

SE — none

SW — none

NW — none



22nd Street

NE — none

SE — none

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress except dog breeds (but see NW)

NW — veterinarian is new neighborhood style



23rd Street

NE — none

SE — restaurant closed / being renovated

SW — vacant lot with construction fence

NW — none (I don't think — I remember the very modern gallery building on the corner being there as many as a dozen years ago or more)



SUMMARY

31 out of the 42 corners on Tenth Avenue from 13th Street to 23rd Street — 74% — show signs of change that are either obviously change in progress (15 corners, or 36%) or else evidence that would (I think) be apparent to anyone who knew the neighborhood of recent change (16 corners, or 38%); only 11 of the corners (26%) showed no signs of recent change.

———————————

Tomorrow I'll go back through these corners and have a second look at the kinds of change that are visible in the photographs (construction; renovation; cleaning up; new "style").

What I’m about here, insofar as I know and can say what it is at this point ….

An astute reader of this blog (Howie Becker) wrote to me this afternoon to suggest that personal reminiscences such as the handful I put into the previous post weren’t helpful from a sociological point of view which is oriented instead towards collective, shared meanings and that I should stay focussed on what we can see (rather than remember) and whose meanings might be more or less the same for lots of people.

Well of course he’s right about that. (And so nice to have readers — especially readers who respond thoughtfully, critically — thanks, Howie!)

No doubt I should have been a lot more explicit about what I'm up to here, and could have been, too, without in any way running the risk of getting my fingers caught in the conceptual Vegematic (or Cuisinart, if you prefer something more upscale). So here goes:

What I was up to — besides, I suppose, a certain amount of undisciplined self-indulgence — in mentioning those things was to get across (if only to myself) the simple and perhaps trivial fact that we, each of us, bring to what we see and hear (and no doubt touch, taste, smell, and feel as well) very specific memories of our personal experience and that constitute no small part of what hermeneuticists might call our “pre-understanding” of what we’re looking at, hearing, experiencing, either “live” or via a recording medium like photography.

And that’s not so much of a hazard when it’s easily recognized as something like “99th Street where my friend so-and-so lived for many years” but could be more so in more subtle ways such as having watched the stretch of the avenue under and near the High Line go from being something pretty grubby to something very chic.

Am I not seeing what’s there to be seen because I’m looking at it through the filters or lenses of my more general — and yes, much more widely shared — memory of it, or am I not seeing the residuals of that former condition because my eye is so absorbed in what’s new?

And — if this is not too lame — I want this blog, at least in this phase, to record, albeit necessarily selectively, a good chunk of what actually passes through my mind as I’m going ahead with the work of looking, including, I fear, a certain amount of what’s merely personal and, I’m even more afraid, an even greater amount of what’s inane, not to say downright stupid.

This is because, with memories of several decades of working on and managing big software projects in a variety of engineering contexts, and memories of lots of ongoing disputes as to how to do them (the “software development methodologies” struggle), I want to convey here, at least a little, how the work actually gets done, or at least how I actually get it done, including all, or a representative selection of, the “stuff” that I do when I'm doing something that gets left out when I retrospectively try to understand how I did what I did.

Because, I think, the connection between how we actually get something done, and what we think we’re doing when we do it, and especially what we think we were doing after we’ve finished doing it, is, if not altogether tenuous, then at least a lot looser than we’d like to imagine, and, by leaving in as much as possible the “junk” activity (mental or otherwise) in the description of the process the door gets left open for later coming to a different understanding of what was happening than would be possible (probably) if that stuff were left out.

Of course looking at that would be another project altogether — or would it?

In any event, here’s the program for the next five or six weeks, as I see it as of now:

1
A “walk” up Tenth Avenue, starting at 13th Street and ending at Broadway/218th Street.

2
the walk divided into segments defined by the major cross streets, so, e.g., 13th to 23rd, 24th to 34th, 35th to 42nd and so on. So, typically, 10-15 blocks or 40-60 corners more or less.

3
Probably only about 20 corners a day, if that — I have to try this out to see what works — so two or three days for each segment. This totals up to five or six weeks, maybe a little more.

4
Each corner/photograph looked at in the first place just for whatever seems — to my eye — most prominent, salient, visually.

5
As Becker suggested, looking at the objects in the photographs and their various attributes (e.g., color, condition) as signs or indicators of something else, e.g., kinds of change, neighborhood demographics, etc., that are otherwise less visible or not visible at all.

6
Probably some elementary counting and enumeration: on this corner: residential building (and private or public housing?); business (and generally of what kind); vacant lot; something under construction (or demolition); how many people actually on the corner (not “in the wings”, I think); and doing what (walking, waiting to cross, talking, hanging out, etc.). — I'll keep all this in a spreadsheet and (probably) report the contents only selectively on the blog (but we'll see).

Please note that this second pass is meant to be just that, a second pass, with possibly many more passes through the set to follow. (All the good methods, whatever the field, are, I think, iterative.)

7
It’s a pest to put in all the pictures and I’ll soon overrun my space allotment if I do, so I’ll put in only a selection, and leave it up to the reader to keep two windows open, one for the blog, the other for New York in Plain Sight, Tenth Avenue (which is in two parts):

Part One: 13th Street — 110th Street

Part Two: 111th Street — Broadway/218th Street

8
And if the approach outlined above turns out to be going nowhere fast, I’ll bail out and try something else as soon as I wake up to that fact. (But I think it will go somewhere, just not sure where yet.)

So tomorrow — or possibly Tuesday, as tomorrow is pretty jammed up with other things: you know, life its own self — the first 20 or so corners of Tenth Avenue, a little closer look, starting at 13th Street.

First pass, fast ….

Notes to yesterday evening's (100522) first, fast pass through the Tenth Avenue photos:

Already, just going from Tenth at 13th Street up to 20th Street I see that I'm looking at these photographs with eyes that know this neighborhood rather well, so that I'm seeing them very much in the context of my prior knowledge —

Tenth Avenue & 13th Street, Northeast & Southeast Corners

— OK, that's the High Line in the background on 13th Street, now finished and open as Manhattan's newest and possibly chicest park (well, maybe after Gramercy)

— amazing what's become of the formerly very grotty Meatpacking District

— now moving up into the Chelsea art gallery district (I remember when this was absolutely nothing, and all those galleries were in SoHO)

Tenth Avenue & 20th Street, Southeast Corner

and so on: shall I write all of these random thoughts up as I go along? No, not on this first pass, this enough to give the flavor of it, in this respect, I think.

Of course, just at the very beginning, at 13th Street, I took the two corners again early in 2010 and can't help wanting to make comparisons of the "then and now" type.

Is the discipline to disallow that sort of digressive thinking or is it rather to encourage it and see where it leads? Don't know yet. At least for a while I think I'll let everything lead me wherever it goes.

And personal memories intrude too:

Tenth Avenue & 24th Street, Southeast Corner

24th Street, SE — where my friend Carl Morse lived all the time I knew him until he died not quite two years ago.

Tenth Avenue & 26th Street, Northeast Corner

26th Street, east side — the scary projects between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, and somewhere in there the theater where I saw a production of my friend Bill Hoffman's play "Cornbury" last winter — no, gosh, winter before last already. Everett Quinn was fabulous as Cornbury.

Tenth Avenue & 27th Street, Southwest Corner

27th Street SW — Paul Kasmin Gallery — flashbacks to London 40 years ago, also memories of a great show of Morris Louis paintings maybe ten or a dozen years ago.

Tenth Avenue & 30th Street, Northwest Corner

30th Street, NW — one of the very few exceptions to my "no retouching" rule: the brick wall on the left was totally "blown out" (white) due to overexposure due in turn to not wanting to underexpose the corner itself under the High Line (and in its shadow). So I took that part of the wall from a prior exposure in which the shadows were almost completely "plugged" (black) but the sunlit wall was fine, and merged the two in PhotoShop. (But this doesn't, in my book, count as "substantive" retouching.)

OK, enough of this sort of thing, it takes too long for this first, fast pass, so let's roll on through.

Finished the fast pass around 7:35 PM and I started around 7 PM so about 35 minutes to race through 649 photographs, whew.

This was mostly meant just as a sort get reacquainted, so no systematic result, except as indicated, a sense of the different levels of looking/responding to the pictures, depending on how much I'm paying attention to the context I bring via "the eye's mind" (as I called it in a previous post), and how much of that is personal experience as opposed to general — I think I mean "book" — knowledge. And the difficulty of seeing what's in the pictures without too much reference to this context of prior knowledge.

Will try to look at them, going forward, at least in part, as if they were anywhere, and not where I know them to be, or for that matter, when.

Impossible to do in any absolute sense of course, but an orientation even to the impossible can maybe change "how things look" nonetheless, and thus sort of freshen up the eye.

Why Tenth Avenue? And a few stats ….

I didn't give a lot of thought to which street or avenue to start with, mostly because the choice seemed pretty obvious to me. Here's why:

Going through the whole set — 11,485 photographs (I think) — would be just too much.

A single neighborhood, e.g., the East Village, Chinatown, Spanish Harlem, Inwood, would be too uniform, though of course even in a single neighborhood there's a lot of variety.

The cross (east-west) streets just aren't long enough to provide enough corners to look at, though of course the changing scene from one side of the island to the other would be a study in its own right. "East Side, West Side …."

That leaves the long "north-south" avenues, and a restriction, even then, to those that run for many miles and pass through many neighborhoods.

Which gets the choices down to Broadway (the longest), and the "grid" avenues: First, Second, Third, etc., and the subsequent additions: Lexington and Madison.

Not Broadway, then, even though it's the only one that runs the whole length of Manhattan, just out of a sense that it's been over-done (and very well done too, sometimes).

After which the next longest is Tenth Avenue, which runs from just below 13th Street all the way up to the Broadway Bridge over the Harlem River at the very top of the island, starting in the West Village and passing through Chelsea, Hell's Kitchen, Clinton, the Upper West Side, Manhattan Valley, Morningside, Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Washington Heights, Fort Washington/Fort George, and Inwood — so that satisfies the multi-neighborhood requirement for sure!



A few stats on the photos:

649 photographs (but I'll look at a some rejects, too, and some reshoots)

Shooting dates:

April 10, 2006: 13th Street & 14th Street

May 18, 2006: 15th Street up to 34th Street

July 1, 2006: 35th Street up to 59th Street

July 10, 2006: 61st Street NW, 79th Street NW, 104th Street NE & NW (most of this stretch I subsequently reshot, these were the keepers from the July 10th shoot)

July 19, 2006: 60th Street up to 110th Street (with the above exceptions)

August 12, 2006: 111th Street up to 168th Street

September 1, 2006: 218th Street SE (from an Inwood shoot).

September 12, 2006: Dyckman Street up to Broadway (at 218th Street)

September 17, 2006: 190th Street SW & NW (from a St Nicholas Avenue shoot)

September 21, 2006: 169th Street up to 189th Street

All shot with Canon 1 Ds Mark II 16.7 megapixel digital SLR; all with Leica 28-90 R lens


Tenth Avenue was laid out on the famous Commissioner's grid plan of 1807/1811. Unlike the other avenues defined by that plan, which end at 155th Street (but have since been extended north), Tenth Avenue is shown running all the way up to the top of the island (it now stops two blocks short of the top).

Since 1880, Tenth Avenue from the north side of 72nd Street on up to where it meets Fort George Avenue has been known as Amsterdam Avenue. Sometime thereafter (?) the name Amsterdam was extended south from 72nd Street to 59th Street. Tenth Avenue resumes under its own name at Dyckman Street in Inwood.

"Field notes"

I don’t want to get caught up in the conceptual Vegematic here but I thought a few words about “field notes” might be in order despite the risk of sliced fingers.

Of course, the New York in Plain Sight photos themselves can be regarded as a kind of “field notes,” though that wasn’t my intention per se in taking them. Or was it?

I did keep a project journal during the 2006 shooting — readers of the first round of posts will have gotten a sense of what that's like — which isn’t the same thing as keeping field notes, mostly because during the shooting itself there was no time to be making notes and also because there was so much work to do with each day’s take afterwards that even the project journal notes were often pretty minimal.

On the other hand, now, starting to go through the New York in Plain Sight photos as if they, and not their subject directly, were the object of study (tricky, that — let’s just see how it goes), the process of looking at them, of trying to see whatever it is that there is to see in them, what thoughts they prompt, and how those thoughts hang together across a whole bunch of them, possibly even all of them, is a project in its own right, and it makes sense to me, at this point, to start keeping "field notes" on looking at them, just as I might have made such notes instead of photographs (or in addition to photographs) but didn’t at the time I took the pictures.

And why bother?

Because the exercise — the discipline, even — of writing, even of jotting, of putting into words the experience of looking is a first step in abstracting from the virtually infinite amount of detail in the photographs themselves and getting at a explicitly conceptual understanding of what emerges as “of interest” (at least to me) as a result of having a close look at the pictures with precisely this result in mind.

So we’ll see ….

Restart

I stopped posting to this blog a couple of weeks ago when I felt that I'd run out of things to say. Maybe I'd overdone it with 31 posts in 30 days — friends warned me against this hazard when I started but of course I ignored them. So call it "burn out" or whatever.

But actually there's a little more to it than that, or just that, I think.

I started making notes towards what became New York in Plain Sight now already five years ago; started the planning in earnest four and a half years ago; and started the photography proper four years and nearly three months ago. Followed by three years of editing, processing, cataloging, keywording (still not finished, not by a long shot), prepping for the website, and general cleaning-up (including catching corners that I'd missed and reshooting ones that had, in my judgment, not turned out well enough, for whatever reasons).

All this gave simple purpose and meaning to my life (at least in this respect) throughout these past four to five years — and then, more or less all of a sudden, most of that work was done (though there's still a lot of clean-up to do), which has left something of a hole in my days, and brought with a lot of uncertainty about what's next.

NO, I am not going to move on to tackle on the street corners in Brooklyn, or Queens, or the Bronx, or Staten Island!

And starting the blog helped fill that void — until I began to run out of things to say (I'd accumulated a bunch of ideas over the last few years, and recorded a lot of them in a project journal, and the blog has been a way to give them a first approximation of order, and even to try out developing them a little in one direction or another without getting too caught up in trying to make something too finished out of them too soon.

But more than running out of things to say — maybe I did, maybe I didn't — came a very disorienting sense of not knowing what to do next, whether with New York in Plain Sight or with something else, entirely different, possibly not even photography-related.

It seemed premature to call New York in Plain Sight "done done" when in truth it was scarcely even "done" and at the same time I was — and in a way still am — rather at a loss as to what to do with it now.

One obvious thing to do, and which I did do, was to notify and/or update a lot people about the "done" if not "done done" status of the thing.

Then it occurred to me, mostly in consequence of a wonderful meeting with some terrific sociologists and urbanists to look at and discuss the project last week (I'll report on this in another post soon), that I'd been conceiving New York in Plain Sight too narrowly, namely as a photography project, and conceiving my role in it equally narrowly, namely as a photographer.

It's entirely possible that finishing up the photography isn't the end of New York in Plain Sight but instead is just barely the beginning of something.

But what?

Well, one of the great principles that I've resorted to from time to time in my life (though of course only when forced by circumstances) is that when you don't know what to do next with some project or undertaking, and have spent enough time considering that to be pretty sure that this is a correct assessment, then the thing to do is to do something — almost anything will do — and have at it, vigorously, just to see what turns up as a result.

And if the first "something" turns out to be a dead-end (it does happen), well, then, try another something, and so on.

So here goes: with only the vaguest idea of what I'm about, I'm taking the Tenth Avenue corners and plan to have a serious look, or actually multiple serious looks at all of them, and see what comes of that.

And to record the process here, on the blog, so to speak as daily or near-daily "field notes" of the process.

So far, the only thing to report is that for speed and convenience I made a set of full size JPGs (meaning the same size, pixel-wise, as the archival files) this morning of all the Tenth Avenue corners and imported them into their very own LightRoom catalog (so as not to run the risk of messing up the master catalog).

This evening I'll walk through the whole set, just to see what I can see and, especially, to see whether there are any surprises, not that I'm expecting any: I've been looking at all these photographs over and over again for several years now and actually they've all gotten to be pretty familiar to me, so the biggest surprise would be to be surprised at all.

At the same time I do know that the real surprises more often come from looking longer and more closely at what one already "knows" than from looking at what is unfamiliar and thus most vulnerable to being seen with all one's stereotypes, expectations, and prejudices as filters.

I'll let you know what happens tomorrow or the next day — expect new posts every day or two now, at least for a while, while I see how this turns out.

Time out

River Terrace & Vesey Green, Southwest Corner

I think I've said all I've got to say for the time being about New York in Plain Sight, though I'm sure there will be more before too long, at which point I'll resume blogging.

"Never apologize, never explain …."

I've long been a fan of the maxim attributed to Noël Coward: "Never apologize, never explain …." Not that I follow this maxim myself — I am a chronic over-apologizer and over-explainer (is there a 12-Step Program for this? don't tell me, I don't want to know) — but I admire the insouciance, and perhaps the wisdom, of an attitude that I am unable to attain to myself.

Tenth Avenue & 30th Street, Northwest Corner

And so from the outset of the New York in Plain Sight project I've been torn between two pairs of opposing impulses:

1
to explain everything vs. to explain nothing

2
to apologize for the evident madness of the undertaking vs. to say nothing about it.

Of course, if one has, or ever has had, intellectual ambitions (not to say pretensions) of any sort (I confess, I confess), then explanations are more in keeping with that, and the more voluminous, the more detailed and expansive, the more so.

Why not relate the project to the very essence of photography? Or if one believes that there is no such essence, then at least to what various people at various times and places have thought that essence to be, however mistakenly?

And so on — surely further examples are unnecessary, though of course they would make for a longer and thus more "serious" post.

Why not just let the project speak for itself, so to speak, without any "captioning" of this global, explanatory kind?

True enough, many photographs are only meaningful in relation to their captions, or at least become more meaningful, or their meaning more specific, in relation to their captions and even in relation to what else the photographer and others — e.g., critics, curators — have to say about them.

And on the other hand, in some circumstances, especially in some photo essays — I'm thinking of Frank's The Americans — the uncaptioned images nonetheless in effect caption or explain one another by their relationships with one another not only in their subjects but in their sequencing within the essay.

That said, isn't it enough to know, and does it even really need to be said at all, that New York in Plain Sight is a set of pictures of everyday life at street level in daytime Manhattan in the long summer (mostly) of 2006? Doesn't saying more result in more closure instead of greater openness?

So that "less is more" really means something in this regard?

I think I'll say no more about it — for now. (I know that tomorrow I'll be unable to resist more explanations.)

And the madness of it? The most I think I should say about that is, probably, "never apologize, never explain …."

R. Mutt

I’m one of those people who are “interested” in things like the origins of art and questions like “what is art” and so on.

I put “interested” in quotation marks to indicate that my interest in these topics isn’t all that serious — I haven’t made a career or a profession out of them, which seems to be a requirement these days for having anything to say about anything — but that it’s still interest enough for these things to be have been on my mind with some frequency for a good part of my life.

Baxter Street & Grand Street, Southeast Corner

So here’s what I think (this is not a scholarly blog, so I’ll just tell you, minus references, bibliography, arguments with others who think differently, etc.):

Art has its origins in decorating the human body (e.g., body painting, tattoos, scarification, hair styling, jewelry, etc.) and, equally, and from this point of view, equivalently, in ways of designing and decorating ordinary everyday artifacts (e.g., clothing, pots, housing, tools, weapons, etc.).

These designs and decorations serve partly as kinship markers and partly as sexual selectors.

Sexual selectors in much the same way as the male peacock’s tail (though artifactual rather than natural in their production): sexual attractiveness (and, ultimately, differential reproduction) is favored by their possession and by their size, complexity, expense, etc.

Kinship markers in the sense of identifying who is related to whom, and in what degree, at least to the extent of marking the boundaries of forbidden and permitted sexual partnerships — the location of this boundary being itself social/consensual in origin.

In short, these designs and decorations told us — how many hundred thousand years ago? if not still today? — who we might legitimately include among our prospective sexual partners, and who among them were the most attractive?

I would imagine the differentiation of designs and decorations among different kinship communities emerged in much the same way as linguistic differentiation: a natural consequence of the course of linguistic change in more or less closed communities.

And perhaps the decorations of the human body served the same purpose to begin with (as if there were any specific “beginning,” which I’m sure there was not) and only later began to take on the role of differenting sexual attractiveness within a kinship group.

In any event, the twin functions of “art” (as we’ve come to call it): regulating reproduction by artifactually creating or augmenting differential sexual attractiveness and by marking the boundaries of legitimate sexual partnership surely developed together, over the long transition from whatever we once were to what we now can recognize as unequivocally “human,” i.e., like ourselves (which always, apparently — not to also say, “alas” — depends a great deal on how we understand ourselves too).

We may even have “co-evolved” along with them, i.e., our responses to “art” may be so to speak “wired into us” by now — but I’m not sure that that’s a necessary consequence of the preceding propositions (which isn’t to say that it might not be true).

Eventually — when? how? — decoration became a separate domain of human endeavor (another example of the division of labor), though not one that has ever really lost all contact with its roots, and people who could do so made things for the (apparent) sake of the decorations themselves — “art for art’s sake” has surely been with us for tens of millenia — and one that could connect with, support, and be supported by, the new regimes of social organization that then emerged along with sedentism, agriculture, cities, industry, religion, "spiritual values," and so on, and that are still very much characteristic of our lives today.

The idea of a non-decorative art — sometimes called "anti-art" — which arrived in 1917 under the signature “R. Mutt” (= German “Armut” = “poverty,” among many, probably equally valid, though not mutually exclusive, interpretations) has added a new wrinkle to our sense of art, and gradually the question of “taste” (the ability to read in a nuanced way the social implications of art/decoration, so eloquently discussed by the 18th century Scottish moral philosophers) has been displaced by the question of “art.”

The new, post-R. Mutt, career of the art work is to make the transition from being, at its creation, “not art” in the judgment of the reigning art-world, to being recognized as “art” by a suitably transformed or reconstituted art-world.

The job of the would-be artist is, accordingly, to make something that isn’t “art” and then to change the existing art-world, or create a new one, or both together, in which it will be “art.”

Without, of course, challenging this paradigm or its results.

What might have been “revolutionary” 100 years ago — or in some cases, possibly even 200 years ago (I’m thinking of Beethoven here, and yes, music does fit this paradigm as well) — is now social mobility, or at least entrepreneurship.

But then, when wasn't it?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Or people do (or don’t).

… no, seriously ….

Sometimes it's just not possible to take all of this so seriously.

I think I'll go out with the camera and take a bunch of pictures — it's a nice enough day here in New York — just for fun (what an idea).

Saint Nicholas Avenue & Wadsworth Avenue, Southwest Corner

But as I was about to hit the "publish post" button, the thought occurred to me: maybe I am taking New York in Plain Sight too seriously.

It is, after all, just a bunch of pictures. A rather big bunch — about 11,500 — but still, just a bunch of pictures.

Nice enough pictures, many of them, and some people seem to enjoy them; still, lots of people seem to be indifferent to them — well, that's hardly a surprise.

Not that I want to dismiss the more serious stuff — just don't want it to overwhelm the project, or, more importantly, to overwhelm me ….

I think I will go out now with the camera now and take a bunch of pictures — just for fun.

"Publish Post"!

Project journal entry for April 21, 2006

Sometimes — often, and more and more often, actually — I think I've spent the last four years with New York in Plain Sight wondering just what the hell I was doing and why.

But only rarely have I found myself doubting whether it's worth doing — although of course there are occasionally days like that as well.

Eleventh Avenue & 29th Street, Southeast Corner

Since yesterday was one of those days — and today isn't — here's where I was at on the "what and why" questions around 9:30 PM on April 21, 2006:

… every street corner is both a self-portrait of the local people for whom it marks one corner of the village square, and part of the larger self-portrait comprising all of the island's street corners.

The following was then crossed out:

Let's get dirt simple, and pragmatic.

Why street corners?
     uniformity
     variety
     manageability
Try again later when not so distracted.

The entry then goes on again:

This afternoon — 182 street corners — the Lower East Side — Bowery to Essex, Hester to Stanton, inclusive.

[...]

More about street corners project:

     — so democratic _ all — rich, poor, white, black, young, old, etc.
     — not selective — another take on "all"
     — There is an elusive something about the size of the project

17,000 photos more or less [at this time my estimate was still about 50% too high] and its inclusiveness, and its totality-ness (all Manhattan), and the interaction of this size with my intention to somehow regard the thing in its entirety as a single work of art — of which the individual photographs are the elements — and of course any single one of them may be considered an artwork by itself … still, I definitely want to regard, I definitely intend the whole as a single work of art that exists as such only at the level, the level of the totality of all the individual photographs.

So here the question is: what does it mean to have a work so vast?

One that one can't possibly see all at once? In this sense, it's musical, in that it can only be experienced in time — any viewing of it has a whole and complex past, present, and future.

But not just one route through it, unlike most music, which has only one route (though not only one performance).

Even as a serial piece it's odd: there is an implicit order, at least, in the subject, there is a topology — or even several topologies — for instance, the 4 corners of one intersection are a set of neighbors, but if I walk down one side of the avenue and up the other, they are not neighbors as 4 but as 2 pairs of two.

Sometimes, these days, what keeps me going with it is the daily report from Google Analytics on visits to the main New York in Plain Sight web site.

The numbers aren't high, but they're steady, and it's nice to know that a few dozen people (typically) are dropping in every day to have a look.

Which is a good part of why I did it.

Random corner #3: Fifth Avenue & 76th Street, Southeast

This Wednesday's random corner is Fifth Avenue and 76th Street, the southeast corner. As usual, I'll just run through a quick sampling of what turns up in a handful internet searches and some of the standard reference works.

Fifth Avenue & 76th Street, Southeast Corner

Both Fifth Avenue and 76th Street were defined by the Commissioner's street plan of 1807-1811, though the plan envisaged this as a full, four-corner intersection.

Today 76th Street is interrupted at Fifth Avenue by Central Park (it resumes on the other side of the park at the Commissioner's Eighth Avenue, now known as Central Park West. So 76th Street tees into Fifth Avenue — actually it tees away from Fifth Avenue, in accord with the Manhattan one way street rule that "it's odd to be going to Jersey, even to Queens" — and offers only a northeast corner and today's southeast corner.

Originally about halfway between the Commissioner's Hamilton Square and Observatory Place (two of four small parks in the area provided for by the 1807-1811 plan), today the intersection is about halfway between the Frick Collection (between 70th & 71st Streets) and the vast complex of the Metropolitan Museum (main entrance at 82nd Street).

So at Fifth Avenue and 76th Street we are deep in the heart of the famous "Museum Mile," which also includes the Neue Gallerie (at 86th Street), the Guggenheim (between 88th and 89th Streets), the National Academy of Design (at 89th Street), the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (at 91st Street). The Museum of the City of New York is just a little further up Fifth Avenue (at 103rd Street).

Prime real estate, this, though as is usual with such neighborhoods, the visual interest to the photographer is in inverse proportion to the ambient wealth ….

The Harkness House at the other end of the block (northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 75th Street) gets a mention by White & Willensky; otherwise there's little to see on this side of the street except piles of limestone, canvas awnings with well-polished brass stanchions, and uniformed — not to say liveried — doormen.

De gustibus non est disputandum — I suppose everyone has to live somewhere.

The Sabrett hot dog stand graces this corner with a little real color and an excellent hot sausage as well.

The mind's eye (and the eye's mind)

People involved with photography speak of the "imaging chain," by which they mean the sequence that begins with whatever is front of the lens and — depending on how finely they want to slice this sequence — continues through the lens to the capture medium (film or digital sensor or whatever else there may be — tofu or the green grass growing on my neighbor's lawn will work also, or so I'm told) and thence to some kind of processing (chemical or digital or baking or fermenting or watering) in order finally to arrive at an end product which is (today; usually) either a print or a slide or an image displayed on a monitor.

Ninth Avenue & 32nd Street, Northwest Corner

Of course, as photographers and others also recognize, this is just the technology part of the chain. The whole chain includes at the beginning the photographer and his or her "eye", intentions, and even prior experience and knowledge of photography and photographs and many other things as well.

And at the other end of the chain, there is the viewer of the photograph, his or her "eye," interests (the counterpart to the photographer's intentions), and prior experience and knowledge of photography and photographs and all those other things too.

I'd like for a moment to leave the technology part of the chain out of it, to take it completely for granted, and spend a little time musing about the photographer and the viewer, their "eyes" and their intentions, interests, prior experience, and so on.

By "eye" of course, I don't mean the physiological eye, though that's undeniably necessary. And I'd like to abbreviate "intentions, interests, prior experience, etc." to a single word: "mind."

In these terms, the "eye" is everything that is constitutive of seeing what is seen, and thus includes the photographer's or viewer's mind as well.

So that there's really no difference between the mind's eye and the eye's mind — the fusion of eye and mind in this sense is total, unavoidable, and inescapable.

And what of it?

I take it as given, but also regard as an empirical truth (until proven otherwise), that we never stop learning, that we are always learning, every millisecond that we're alive we're learning. Of course, as time goes on, much of what we're learning is "just" reinforcement  of what we've learned before (though usually with at least subtle differences).

So with every image that we see, or for that matter with every act of seeing, well-attended to or not, the image of what is seen is added to the cumulative result of what we have learned: added, that is, to the eye's mind or the mind's eye (whichever way you prefer to think of it).

A person who has looked seriously at 9,999 photographs is seeing the 10,000th photograph so to speak through the aggregate "lens" of the prior 9,999; and that 10,000th photograph will look quite different in another ten or twenty years when seen again, this time through the aggregate lens of, say, 99,999 photographs instead of a mere 9,999.

And this is true for both the photographer and the viewer.

If anything is communicated from the photographer via the photograph (and all the intervening links in the chain) to the viewer, then it must be because the photographer and the viewer have enough experience in common, have similar enough minds' eyes or eyes' minds for this communication to take place.

Is this the source of photography's real "magic"? Or the sense that we often have that there is something "magical" about it?

What I mean is, the photograph — the print, the slide, the image on the monitor — holds out the promise that there is something in common between us, the viewers, and the photographer, something that can be shared — an interest, an intention: a deliberate act of meaning — across thousands of miles and, by now, nearly 200 years.

But, you object, you could say the same thing about writing, or painting, or music, or even a folk tale handed down orally from generation to generation.

Yes, indeed. You could — and I would.

More, to quote James Joyce, in "tobecontinueds tale."

The 1:3 apect ratio

All but three of the photographs in New York in Plain Sight were taken with digital cameras with a sensor aspect ratio of 2:3 — the "classic" ratio of 35mm film, dating back to the Ur-Leica of nearly 100 years ago. The three that were not were taken with a borrowed camera with a sensor aspect ratio of 3:4 — curiously, perhaps, this was a Leica-branded (actually a Panasonic) digital camera.

So if uncropped and otherwise geometrically uncorrected, the photographs would have all (with three exceptions) had an aspect ratio of 2:3, that is, 50% wider than tall, since they were all taken with the camera held horizontally.

I have cropped all of them to an aspect ratio of 1:3.

Lexington Avenue & 49th Street, Northeast Corner

Because in general I composed the photographs with the horizon or eye-level line in the middle of the frame, in most all of them, this cropping amounted to eliminating, more or less, the upper and lower fourths of the image. Often, though, I found the photograph as I took it to have too wide a field of view — too "wide-angle" — and so I cropped it in from one or both sides as well, with a corresponding narrowing top to bottom as a consequence.

It's not easy to hold a camera perfectly level, and so in the processing, I also corrected for that, i.e., rotated the images so the horizon line would be parallel to the top and bottom edges of the frame. And then corrected the converging verticals that are an unavoidable optical result of not having the camera level in the sense of parallel to the plane of the buildings. (In some cases the camera was deliberately held pointing up or down, but even so I intended to, and did, correct the resulting converging verticals).

Otherwise, except for exposure correction and color (white) balancing (when obviously needed), I left the images "as is." And often enough I left the color balance alone too; less often the exposure. Had I been working with a tripod and a shift lens, the geometric corrections would have been done at the time the photograph was made, by leveling the camera and using shift to avoid the need for pointing the lens up or down.

Which would have been better, I think, but vastly more time consuming — I'd still be photographing!

So in a certain sense the biggest "editorial" decision I made — other than choosing which frame to use when there were several, as there usually were — was where to crop. And this decision was constrained by my having settled, early on, on a 1:3 apect ratio. (I should say, at this point, that the original "raw" files are unaffected, so it's always possible to go back to the image as shot.)

The difficulty, of course, is that if I come in a little more from the sides in order to eliminate X or to concentrate the image more on Y, then I'm bringing it in from the top and bottom as well, and may then have to choose between getting X out of the image on the right or left or not having A or B near the top or bottom.

Well, such is life. The real question was, why 1:3? Actually, there's a logically antecedent question, or even two questions: Why crop at all? And why crop uniformly? Why not have different aspect ratios for different corners? After all, there's nothing sacred about the sensor aspect ratio.

The answers are pretty straightforward, I think, though the thoughts aren't inherently compelling except in regard to my intentions for the project.

The aspect ratio 1:3 is simply what you get if you put two pictures together, each of which has the classic 2:3 aspect ratio. So in my ideal corner picture (which occurs relatively rarely — here as so often the "ideal" in theory is anything but ideal in practice), there would be in effect a 2:3 image to the left of the center of the corner and a 2:3 image to the right.

And there didn't seem to be much point in including a lot of asphalt in the photographs, so cropping that out made a lot of sense to me — indeed, as the project progressed, I found myself cropping out more and more of it, and moving the horizon / eye-level line down from where I initially placed it, at the midpoint (vertically).

Correspondingly, these moves eliminated a lot of the upper part of the frame, so that, more often than not, the upper floors of the buildings are elininated as well. (There's a lot variation in this across the set). Which leaves a picture that is a little street at the bottom, then mostly sidewalk and whatever is happening on it, and a little architecture above the sidewalk (ground floor) level.

I wanted the photographs to be "about" everyday life at street level, and this cropping helps, I think, to narrow the frame to include that and not much more. But I also wanted a lot of variety, since I felt that there was a danger of getting too mechanical, which would call attention to the photographs at the cost of seeing the subject.

Which is also why I wanted a uniform cropping: it would be distracting, clicking through hundreds or thousands of images to have the aspect ratio changing all the time. I want the viewer looking at the subject, not distracted from it by anything else about the pictures.

If I reshoot New York in Plain Sight as I hope to, next year, I think I'd aim for rather less variation, but I'd still try to avoid complete uniformity. And I think I'd stick with the 1:3 aspect ratio, or something very close to it, say 1:2.5.

Just thought maybe you might want to know ….