And here: nny2010.org/made is where you can see all the photos that were in the show.

It’s 10:20 PM here and still 92 degrees, so I’m going to go lounge in the front room  by the a/c and away from the computer. Thanks to all for the kind words my recent Urban Omnibus Candela piece, and I will be back here as soon as the heat wave lets up a bit. Stay cool!

For those of you who live further away, the website will allegedly be up soon.

The other day when I was leaving work, I hallucinated that I was going to step out of the elevator into the plan for an office lobby I had been drawing, rather than the actual office lobby I step out into every day. The good news is this means I’ve actually been architecting a bit at work (Plans! Sections! Elevations!), but the bad news is I am kind of overtired lately. You can blame that in part on the kittens resuming their 6am pouncing/snuggling ritual, among other things.

Another consequence of my overtiredness was, as you may remember, blanking on the date of the photo show opening for the Architectural League’s New New York Photography Corps project (The City We Imagined/The City We Made) and generally losing track of the current date. Luckily someone at work reminded me round about 4p that my own opening was happening and I managed to make it (it is a mere 3 or 4 blocks from my office) and even round up a modest entourage to meet me there.

It’s an interesting show—and the opening was jam-packed with interesting people—but I must confess myself a bit disappointed at first glance. The photos were all small and dim and murky—a consequence, I’m guessing, of the paper quality and possibly being printed in RGB mode rather than CMYK (and I know this must have been an expensive show to put together, so it’s understandable though still disappointing). Plus, since I’ve looked at them so much in glowing, radiant on-screen color, anything less than a stellar print was bound to be a bit disappointing. They’re small, too, because there are 1,000 of them. That’s a lot of photos! I’m hopeful that the forthcoming website and possible book will show off the photos a little better. (More info on these, of course, as it arrives.)

That said, the show is worth a visit. The photos are paired with an interesting timeline of the past decade of New York’s history. At first it was difficult to focus on a static, printed timeline (I’ve become so used to interactive hypertext versions of same), but once I slowed down a bit and started reading, I certainly learned a thing or two.

There are many lovely photos (and it’s fun to play Find-The-Photos-By-The-People-You-Know-Or-Yourself), but they are less the journalistic documents they have been posited to be than architectural portraits, and it’s a bit unclear how the many stories they tell might match up with what’s shown in the timeline. Overall the storytelling aspect of the show was a bit lacking and the parts are a bit disjointed, though it is a fantastic slice-of-life documentary, full of new discoveries as well as old friends from the city’s skyline.

I don’t think the review in New York Magazine really got it right. “What emerges from the exhibit is how, even as New York transformed, it hardly changed at all…” Really? Unchanged? Did you see all the photos of new buildings? Did you read the timeline? Though I guess one of the strengths of the show is that it’s such an immense collage of information, you can read into it what you like.

In the end it was a fantastic exercise for me, I learned a ton about photography, and I got to investigate some neighborhoods I hadn’t been to as well as some I frequent.

SO YOU WANT TO VISIT?
The show is located at 250 Hudson Street (entrance on Dominick between Varick and Hudson), and is open through June 26. Hours are Wednesday through Sunday, from noon until 7p.

This exciting update just in: the exhibition will be moving to Governors Island this summer, from July 2-August 15! More information as soon as I get it…

JUST THE PHOTOS, PLEASE
Those of you who can’t see the show in person will, I hope, soon be able to peruse the forthcoming website. In the mean time, the photos I submitted are on Flickr in this set and this one. I will gather together the photos actually in the show when I have a moment.

As you can see we got almost no snow in these parts (there’s more salt on the ground than snow), but we did get some frigidosity, and so spending all afternoon outside has revived the cold I thought I had kicked earlier this week. Thus, early to bed for me. Tomorrow night I have to map, edit and upload pix to the Architectural League NNYPC pool, so it will probably be a couple of days before I get back here to tell you the full story. In the mean time, though, you can see some pictures over yonder at Flickr.

Soooooo, to make a long story longer, the idea of the NNYPC sounded perfect—a focused assignment to take pictures of specific neighborhoods in the city, mentorship by established architectural photographers, and a show at the end of it all.

With the best intentions, the Architectural League, I gather, must have let everyone in who applied—there were over 100 people. While that is totally fantastic as far as getting diverse views of the city, it meant the communication with the established photographers was pretty minimal, and the assignments were created on the fly without, I assume, too much preparation since the organizers were kept on their toes just keeping up with the logistics of so many participants.

The gist of the project is documenting how New York City has changed in the last 10 years. Here we are at the end of a decade of Bloomberg, nearly a decade since the Twin Towers were transformed into a gash in the urban fabric (still not healed), a decade of urban transformation. So our first assignment was to photograph this somewhat ineffable thing, how the city has changed, and to hit at least 3 boroughs. As far as I could tell (and I’m sorry I can’t show you the pictures yet), more people ignored the rules than followed them, so it ended up being a pretty freeform project.

Me, I like structure and the prospect of photographing the entire city of New York was just too much to contemplate, especially since the weather wasn’t particularly cooperative for part of the time. So I focused (ha) on finding things that weren’t there ten years ago, or were drastically different. And seriously, just wandering around my own neighborhood gives me vertigo sometimes. I literally got dizzy looking up at all the high rises along the East River. Where there used to be garbage dumps and squatters there are now glittering towers of condos. Weird!

I took most of my pictures in one huge photo-walk of a day, starting here in Williamsburg, walking up through Greenpoint and across Newtown Creek to Long Island City and Hunters Point, then under the East River to Times Square. Wshew!

[First round of photos.]

The second assignment was to photograph our own neighborhoods and two other neighborhoods—mine were Greenpoint and Ladies’ Mile (roughly the area between Union Square and the Flatiron District, which used to be lined with fancy-pants department stores 200 years ago). Greenpoint I have always found to be a photogenic neighborhood, so I was happy to go back there again. I miss some of the urban decay that’s been disappeared (like the huge factory that burnt down under suspicious circumstances), but there’s still plenty to be found , sometimes right down the street from glistening condo-pods, finished or not.

Stalled construction is one of the hallmarks of here, now. So many empty things, big and small. Sometimes I feel like I live in a soon-to-be ghost town, though the emptiness is too new to have any ghosts, unless you count the ghosts that were razed to make way for them, but nobody really does.

Anyway, Greenpoint (like Williamsburg) has changed pretty drastically since I’ve been here (the summer of ’93 for those keeping count), but Ladies’ Mile is a different story. I was happy to take a closer look at this neighborhood, since I’ve always considered Union Square the omphalos mundi (did I spell that right?) of my New York—14th Street is my decumanus and Broadway my cardo. So look again I did, camera in tow. But, yeah, that neighborhood is one that has changed almost not at all. Stores have come and gone (Whole Foods et cetera), but the lovely cast iron buildings along Broadway are pretty much unchanged. So I took pictures of what new things I could find, but it was a bit uninspiring.

[Second round of photos.]

So that’s the story. There will allegedly be a show (in January I think?), which you will undoubtedly hear all about.

The second assignment was made harder by the shorter days (and the colderness—too bad I didn’t yet have this), and here is the gloaming again. But I think the flurries are starting up here, so maybe I’ll take my camera out into the world for a bit now to see what I can see.

I know I owe y’all the harrowing tales of the LEED GA exam and of the second round of the New New York Photo Corps. Sometimes, though:

Once I get my head on straight I’ll come back at you with the LEED exam info (which a lot of people have been asking for to help them survive the ordeal) and about a million other things I’ve mentally written in my head over the last couple of months. Here and now, though, I’ll at least catch you up on the NNYPC story.

Let me begin by backing up and ‘splaining you something I don’t think I have ‘splained: why I bothered taking on this volunteer project when I had so little free time to begin with. My love of photography began during architecture school—architects have to take a lot of photos (no time for sketching in these fast-paced times), since we sometimes get only a single visit to a site to understand and internalize all the design issues present. So photos, along with Google Earth and Google Maps Street View (oh man have those come in handy so many times), are scrutinized and studied throughout the design process for clues to the nature of the place.

I managed to get a decent point-and-shoot digital camera one summer by including its cost in a grant I wrote that enabled me to spend a couple of weeks in Barcelona studying the nature of the public/private and slow/fast borders there (yet another topic I should write about here, if I don’t write a whole book on it). That was an AMAZING trip. But I was by myself in a country I’d never been to. I can speak Spanish a bit, and I had crammed as much Catalán into my head as I could, but I was alone, a stranger in a strange land.

I had a great time, though, because I had a job to do—take pictures. I got up early every morning and went to all kinds of neighborhoods to take hundreds of pictures (if it were today it would be more like thousands—I was not yet quite as prolific a photographer as now). The neighborhoods were sometimes touristy, sometimes working class, sometimes fancy, sometimes historic. The pictures I made weren’t works of art, but they enabled me to see the city in a new way. I was able to indulge my love of details, my love of public space, and my curiosity about the world in an entirely new way. I took pictures of curb cuts and bollards and planters and doorways. I studied benches and trees and mailboxes and alleys. Barcelona is a city rich with details, with history, and with a lively streetlife at times bordering on total chaos. But it never quite crosses the line, and the cars and pedestrians share plazas and streets in an entirely different way than I had ever seen before. So cool.

In the afternoons I did the standard—but also amazing—architourist thing, eschewing the tour buses and taxi cabs for the subways and city buses to take in every architectural marvel the city had to offer. Somehow in the midst of all that I had time to shop at the Boqería and all kinds of other small food shops and eat at a lot of fantastic restaurants. But without the photography I wouldn’t have gotten to know the city nearly as well, I wouldn’t have had the energy to see so much of it (the daily siestas helped with that, too), and I wouldn’t in fact have had the excuse to go in the first place.

The whole Barcelona adventure was key, but I would not love architecture as much as I do if it weren’t for the digital revolution. I never loved film photography, and while I totally respect people who do, I would never have fallen in love with making photos if I had to deal with chemicals and dark rooms or even hand my film over to a processor and wait for its return. Digital, however, feels natural. I’ve been using Photoshop since the good old days when it only had one level of undo (ah, halcyon days of youth), and the whole process of digital photography is just a joy to me. Oh, it’s often a ton of work, but fun.

Add all that to the advent of Flickr, where I could share photos, see other people’s photos, and most importantly learn about what equipment/settings they had used, and I was hooked. Have I mentioned how much I love Flickr? A simple comment on Flickr makes me feel connected to the world. With Flickr I can show my pictures without a gallery, without an agent, without a book deal. So my photos don’t just pile up in shoeboxes in the corner of a closet. They go out in the world. And I’m sure they get reused, repurposed, and stolen (and I wish they wouldn’t), but for now I’m just happy they get out in the world a bit. One day I hope to have more control over at least some of them, but right now that gives me the focus and motivation to keep taking pictures and keep getting better (and no, Flickr is not paying me to say any of that).

Speaking of hopes, I do one day hope to be my own architect, working for myself. But I know that my angle of interest does not fall 100% inside of architecture (and my idea of architecture does not match up 100% with everyone else’s) and photography is one of the things I want to incorporate into my practice. Photos for architecture, photos of architecture, photos of architectural details, photos of life in the city, photos of design of all kinds. I’m still developing my photographic voice, but that’s the plan.

…OK, that’s already longer that I planned, so I’ll save the actual NNYPC bits for the next post, OK? See you then. In the mean time you can see some of my photos from the NNYPC parts one and two on Flickr if you like.

I could still be taking pictures now—and don’t think I wasn’t tempted—but when my camera battery ran out I realized my own battery had also run out and I dove underground to head home. I had to get underground fast, or I’d walk every block bemoaning the missed photos. Once I get into photo gear it’s surprisingly hard to stop. Everything could be a beautiful picture if you compose it right, wait for the light to be right, choose the right exposure, and steady your hand. More pictures!

So I cut myself off for phase one of this project—I gotta deal with the collapsing ceiling in the bathroom. And sometime soon we should be getting assigned a neighborhood to document in depth. I’m looking forward to that. Trying to document an entire city in a couple of weekends is not a small task. Also, hopefully, some professional architectural photographers will look at our pictures soon and explain to us the secret of perfect pictures.

You can see the photos I’ve uploaded so far in my NNYPC set at Flickr.

Help me out by voting for the best ones (add a comment on the photos you like, or list them here).

I took these photos on one long photo-walk day last weekend. I quickly skimmed through the set to find the ones I thought best told the story of how NYC has changed in the last 8 years (our brief for this first section of the New New York Photography Corps); I may look through again to see if there are more hiding in the +400 photos from that day (I’m also learning a new photo organizing software, so it’s not exactly a fluid process yet). We were asked to include pictures from at least 3 boroughs (I did Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan so far). I should probably include some more actual architecture in the next set…

More photos soon, and I’m looking forward to the next part when we’ll have a more focused assignment (a few particular blocks in the city to document instead of the whole city).  

So, yeah–comment on the pictures you think are best so far. Thanks!

The coolest part of the project (and what motivated me to apply) is that a bevy of kick-ass famous architectural photographers are advising, criting, and curating the process (and the show at the end). I’m hoping to glean their secrets before it’s all over, though the opening gathering doesn’t bode well. They barely got a word in, and as soon as one of them mentioned the words “RAW file” most everyone’s faces glazed over and the topic was hastily changed. Tell me more!

Here’s their description of the show (which will be in January, I believe): “New New York 6 will specifically examine the period in New York since 2001, considering how the policies and priorities of the Bloomberg administration, a frenzied economy, and an increasing interest among the public in architecture and design combined to dramatically transform the shape of the city. The goal of the exhibition is to identify how the city changed during an unusually manic period of development, in order to inform a citywide conversation about the future shape of the city.”

OK, time to get thinking, and photographing…  if you have any ideas or suggestions, let me know!