Welcome!

Greetings:

Welcome to my blog! I live in New York City (Inwood, the far northern end of Manhattan, to be precise) and work as a public defender. I am also a photographer with broad interests in art, design, and politics, as well as all matters related to New York City.

This blog will focus on photography, and in particular my own photography. I also intend, however, to post short "2 cent reviews" about gallery and museum exhibits that I see, in New York, on-line, and elsewhere. Finally, I will occasionally throw in my 2 cents about matters cultural and political.

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To start things off, here is a series I recently completed, all taken during one week on the New York City Subway (principally the A Train and the 1 Train, which take me from my distant Uptown home to work & play further down on this crowded island). It is obviously inspired by Walker Evans's work from the late 1930s and early 40s (compiled in "Many Are Called"), which he took with a folding camera hidden in his jacket. I didn't hide my camera, and simply pretended to be reading my newspaper while pressing the shutter.

The title of this 7-photo series is "Week":

Monday:

Tuesday:


Wednesday:



Thursday:



Friday:



Saturday:



Sunday:


This 2008 update of Evans's project from 70 years ago reveals, if nothing else, the changing make-up of New York City. Contrary to James Agee's claim (from the original preface to Many Are Called) that Evans's photographs demonstrate that "[t]hose who use the New York subways are . . . members of every race and nation of the earth," Evans's unaware subjects are nearly all white. I'm not sure which subway lines Evans took, but my guess is that plenty of non-white New Yorkers rode the subways even in the late 1930s -- Evans simply missed them. Regardless, this series, at the least, reflects the diverse face of this city and its subway system in the 21st Century.

Ultimately, though, the similarities trump the differences. However different today's New York is from the New York of the 1930s, the unaware expressions on the faces of anonymous subway riders largely remain the same ....