January

Apropos of nothing on this September day, here is a photograph of the Harlem Meer from January 2008 (looking north toward 110th Street):


I only noticed this image recently, after browsing through some photographs I had taken last winter. I skipped over it when I initially looked at them, but now it caught my eye. Your mileage may vary, but think Harlem, thin ice, vernacular apartment buildings, etc.

Gary Winogrand supposedly said that he waited 2 years before developing (and looking at) a photograph he had taken; he, like many photographers, believed that temporal distance between the moment of capture and the printing / selecting event was critical. The time span allows the photographer some critical distance from his / her own work, the theory goes, and frees him / her to evaluate the image uninfluenced by his / her subjective experience of the moment photographed (which is of course not shared by the viewer).

There's wisdom in that, I accept, though I'm usually too impatient. Two or three weeks is about as much as I can stand.

Here's another from the same gray day in January. No surprise that no one else was present; it was so cold that my frozen fingers could barely press the shutter release:



Conservatory Garden, January 2008.