Posts

Catching a Precious Part of the Day, Pictures March 9 2016

With March advancing toward mid-month, Iit keeps getting dark later everyday, and on a fine day such as this one was, it was light until past 6:30. I’ve been under the weather, and so not riding my bike this week, but I got down to the Hudson River for the first time in several days late this afternoon, leaving my home office after 5:00. I left work on my desk, lest I lose the chance to see how today’s sunset would turn out, and I wondered if I’d catch much of the light. As many who know me and this blog may attest, I have an appetite for late afternoon light. The amazing thing about living on the west side of Manhattan? We happen to have great sunsets, especially right at the river edge, or standing on the bluff above in Riverside Park, peering across to the river, with New Jersey on the far shore, and the rest of the continent beyond. I live near the park, and appreciate this practically every day. My appreciation of the neighborhood—the enchanted landscape and majestic bridge amid all the urban-ness, with people running, biking, walking dogs, plus the noise, aircraft overhead, traffic rushing by on the West Side Highway, and the light—began in 1990. I moved to the upper west side that year and had a Senior Editor job with Prentice Hall Press, then a division of Simon & Schuster. PHP staff were located—not in Rockefeller Center as S&S was, and is still—but in the office tower just north of Columbus Circle known then as the Gulf & Western Building. I had a small office with a window that invited me to peer westward across the Hudson, out toward America. We were on a pretty high floor, above the thirtieth, and it used to really sway in heavy weather. They do that, one hears, but it felt a bit like being on a ship. The building overlooked Central Park on the side away from my office, a great nabe to work in from July 1990-July 1991.

Quick as I could, I scrambled down there on foot and found the light this evening was extraordinary, and still evolving as a long drawn out event. These picture were taken near the Oscar Hijuelos Tennis Courts, the handsome clay ones, located along Manhattan’s west side river at around 96th St. It was one of the finest sunsets in all the years I’ve been photographing the Great Gray Bridge, the shore, upper Manhattan, the New Jersey side, always reveling in the light and atmosphere, and it lasted longer than most. You may click here to see more from tonight. And, if you want to see more photos like these, you can visit my flickr album labeled “GGB/sunsets/Hudson.”

Help Support Photographer Harvey Wang’s Upcoming Book, “From Darkroom to Daylight”

Harvey Wang is a photographer I admire, whose 2011 exhibit at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum I covered for this blog.Wang exhibit post

Wang had told me about a book he’s writing that chronicles the transition in photography from the darkroom era to the digital age we’re in now, and today I was glad to learn of a Kickstarter campaign he’s running to support publication of the book, which I tweeted about after contributing. Below, you can view a video about the book, and contribute to the Kickstarter via this link. The campaign is running one more week, until July 30.

RIP Saul Leiter, Important NYC Photographer Appreciated in the NY Times

Thanksgiving Afternoon Update: After tweeting and posting about Saul Leiter last night, I’ve seen a few more pieces on him today, and have had quite a wide reaction to what I’d shared. The best piece today is Teju Cole’s postscript on Leiter in The New Yorker. The Brooklyn writer, born to Nigerian parents in the US, was best known to me for his 2102 novel Open City, but now I see he’s also accomplished in photography, writing about it and taking pictures. This is from the end of his fine New Yorker appreciation:

“The content of Saul Leiter’s photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don’t so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water. One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. Precisely how the hypnotic and dreamlike feeling is achieved in Leiter’s work is a mystery, even to their creator. As he said in “In No Great Hurry,” laughing, “If I’d only known which ones would be very good and liked, I wouldn’t have had to do all the thousands of others.”

 

 

Foot on ElSaul Leiter was an amazing photographic artist who I am only just learning about now, because of the obituary on him by Margalit Fox; the Lens blog post about him by friend Tony Cenicola, in today’s NY Times, and a Lens blog post by Cara Buckley from November 15 about a new film on Leiter, “In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter.” Much of his work is at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in NYC. I urge you to look at his work there. This is from Cara Buckley’s post:

“There is something so poignant about Saul Leiter’s work that looking at it can feel like taking a dart to the heart. Drenched in luxuriant, saturated colors, the images instantly transport the viewer into the photographer’s shoes: peeping from beneath an awning to a snow-swept street, or through a befogged cafe window, weeping with condensation, to a man taking pause on a wintry sidewalk. Intimate and empathetic, Mr. Leiter’s photographs relay what all New Yorkers know about their roaring, daunting home: that life in the city is filled with stolen glimpses and fleeting, quietly personal and often gorgeous moments.”

“Yr Obt Servant A Lincoln”–a Gift from an Old Friend


An Alexander Gardner photo of Lincoln, given to me by my late best friend, Robert Henry Adams, of Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago. Rob often gave me pieces he couldn’t re-sell, because of a defect, in this case the crease bisecting the center line. He said it came up at auction and he was the only who bid on it. Still, it is period and bears a Lincoln autograph, either machine-reproduced from his hand, or even possibly, from his hand in ink. Caption reads “Yr Obt Servant A Lincoln.” Rob’s portrayed in pictures and words elsewhere on this blog, here and here, the latter under the heading ‘Franconia College.’