Tag Archives: travel

The General Theological Seminary or the Times Square Debacle

We met at Times Square for the second time, to no avail.  That place is damn hard to shoot.  Noisy, crowded, bright lights and dark spots, enough neon to simulate true daylight at night, working there is an effort in futility.  We are tiny, just another attraction, as tourists take our photos we become part of the madness.  We walk away feeling defeated.  We got no good images from the shoot, nothing even worth putting up here.  It feels so depressing.  We insist that we will return, that we will get the shot, but I wonder.  Maybe sparkly dresses will help.

Then at 11:30pm we decide to head across the street to the campus of the General Theological Seminary.  We have the keys.  We let the dogs off their leashes to play on the lush green grass, a magical oasis on this gritty island.  The school once owned most of the area, I think 140 acres, or what is all of Chelsea.  Now it is just an enclosed city block, with dorms in the surrounding area.  We needed a re-do, a confidence builder, a reminder that yes we can make beautiful, meaningful images, that Times Square had not sucked out or souls.

We donned our new matching dresses, and carried candles on to the close.  This felt so safe, so natural, so relaxed, and so easy.  We effortlessly, began our process of creating, of using light and location.  Obviously, it is easier to create in such a beautiful quiet environment, but shooting there versus Times Square made us think about the nature of the work we were creating.  What we do has such an inherent spiritual quality, for us and for the resulting images.  I think shooting in Times Square, the epicenter of consumer culture, really drains that spirituality away from us.  Where as shooing on a theological campus inherently fills us up with that mysticism.

Does this mean we should abandon Times Square?  That we should shoot in only sacred spaces?  I am not sure, but I really don’t think so.  I think that Times Square, like any trial by fire, pushes us to our limits, to the nature of our faith.  It has not happened yet, but I think if we can make strong and meaningful images there, it will be a great accomplishment.  We must now think of the ritual, the dance that can protect us from the overwhelming nature of Times Square.

Meanwhile, we have this…which basically rocks:

Documented Binge Drinking at the Mafia Mansion

There really isn’t much to say…  this was shot in my old apartment in Brooklyn, a four-story brownstone just off the Gowanus canal.   There are many stories and myths about this house, mostly regarding the Italian mafia.  From the looks of the interior this is possibly true.  The place is decked out in gold lame wallpaper, orange diner booths, wainscoting, mirrors everywhere, and an equal bar to bath ratio.  The owners are said to now reside in New Jersey, and occasionally show up to sign leases in tracksuits and gold chains.  There are even rumors of Frank Sinatra himself partying in this house.  Many of these stories were recounted at Anthony’s, a 100-year-old Italian restaurant across the street.

At the turn of the century, a huge flywheel did come apart from a nearby factory, flying thousands of feet through the air and crushing the top floor of the house.  That I know happened, as I saw the microfiche myself.  When I lived there it was a real co-op, we shared food, cooking responsibilities and many other chores, it was a total pain in the ass, but I loved it.  Now my wonderful friend Marela Zacarias lives there… the chain of friends never ends at the Mansion.

On this evening, it was far to wet to shoot outside and Marela invited us over for happy-beer drinking-playtime.  We set up a rigorous schedule that included shot gunning a beer, changing costume, and getting ready to take the next photo every 30 minutes.  Needless to say things got sloppy, and after a while we didn’t really follow the shooting schedule too closely.  These are the images of debauchery at the Mafia Mansion.

Coney Island

Last night’s adventures took me down to the land of the Russians: Brighton Beach and Coney Island.  We spent the evening strolling up and down the boardwalk as evening fell, stopping for giant beers, pickled cabbage, and Nathan’s hotdogs.  It felt otherworldly down there, and a big part of me really could not believe that I was even still in Brooklyn.  What a crazy wonderful place, and how have I never been there before?

Getting caught up in the ambiance, I let too much time pass and had to beg the gatekeepers in the park to let me in for one quick shot, before the park closed.  Nothing like two ghostly creepy twins in blue dresses haunting a run down carnival.  In fact, I think it would be really fun to do more of these types of shots in different carnivals, as two headed ladies, Siamese twins and such.  Ghost carnies.

As we were shuffling out, we stopped to watch this ride where they slingshot a chair on bungees way in to the air.  In the image it just comes out as a streak of sparkles like a firework.  It was an odd scene with people giving me very strange looks as I waved my flashlight around like a crazy person.  Good thing they moved fast enough not to register on the image.  Without much time to work out a concept and shoot multiple images, I opted to let just the light stand in for myself: thus the ribbon of light.

Brooklyn Bridge

Sometimes after a night of shooting, I wake up with a photography hangover.  Today is such a day.  I think back, things are fuzzy; I wonder what happened the night before.  Did I get the shot?  What that the right exposure?  And then I look at the work.  Like a long night of drinking, moments I thought were brilliant were total flops, and moments of blah, turn out to be the most meaningful.  Part of me craves a re-do, but like any great party there will be another one soon, so I try not to worry. Second chances abound.

Not that I was truly disappointed with the work last night, it is just that I can see how much better we can do.  Along with seeing how much better we can do, I am also starting to recognize the art of collaboration.  My natural instinct, for some reason is to stand square to the camera, like we are facing off, a duel per say.  Aloyse, has a natural propensity to dancing in front of the camera.  It must be the obsessive compulsive in me that desires such rigid symmetry and fears messy images.  In last night’s work, you can really see when Aly was directing, and when I was directing.  Not that either style is better than the other, and actually it might be why we work so well together.  Ultimately, I feel that one of the final images we did, a dance image, was the strongest.

Finally, a word on clichés: I am still struggling with subject.  I know this work is about spirituality, spirit, ritual, the goddess, dance, religion, and more, but how to bring that to the image?  Well, sometimes there is the need to explore clichés.  Possibly to just get them out of the way.  If you do it once, then at least you don’t have to do it again unless it is really working.  Last night for some odd reason, there was a lot of Hindu and Buddhist symbolism in the work.  Chakras and many armed goddesses.  I have no idea why the Brooklyn Bridge brought that out in the work but there it is.  Ok, sorry I am a little rambly today heat does that to me.  So with out further adieu…

Second night at the farm


After a rough early morning, the work we did last night was far more successful.  First we shot at dusk out in the field, while the light was falling, and it seemed like we just did more of the same.  I was staring to worry.  There are not too many successful images from that shoot and the storytelling aspects are really not there.  Not to mention that when I looked at the photos this morning I saw that we had irreparably bad exposures.  When shooting this type of image you have to push your iso a bit and then you risk a serious degradation of the images when you try to fix them up in post.  The blacks block up and there really isn’t much information there.  It’s a tough balance between iso and f-stop, either you get blocky blacks or you loose depth of field and focus.

We started by playing on a large grassy earthen mound on the edge of the field, women in white lined up on top.  I was having issues with my remote properly triggering my timer, so while the light was good we really were not able to get the best images.  Once I finally gave up and hand triggered the timer we had basically lost our light.  We tried a few dancing poses in the field, but the sky was still too bright and we could not seem to coordinate our movements.  It looked really stiff and uninspired, again with bad exposures.  I was beginning to worry, that we were really not going to get anything out of this trip.

Finally, after a few mishaps, we acquired two kerosene lanterns and were able to use those as our light source.  This was the inspiration we needed.  We headed out to the field and were able to shoot three different scenes.  The first is a goddess dance around a fire, the second is a bringing of the light, and the third takes place at the edge of the forest, a mysterious encounter.  I am quite happy with this work.  I only wish we had more nights to work out here.

Old Green Farm

Last night Aloyse Blair and I headed out to the forest on her fathers beautiful farm in New Jersey.  Sunrise was at 5:30am, so we had a 4am wake up call and were out in the forest by 4:20.  We had scoped out the forest the day before and found a few sights that we thought would make good locations. Finding them in the dark was actually easier than we thought, avoiding the poison ivy as we went.

We ran into a few problems right off.  First, I need to get an actual tripod for this work, using my Gorilla Pod just does not give me the flexibility I need to get the shots I want.  Some of our locations really didn’t look very good without the elevation a tripod would have provided.  Second, there is currently no moon and the forest was so devoid of ambient light that it was almost impossible to get anything done with out using alternate light sources.  Tonight we are going to take some old kerosene lanterns out into the forest with us, which should provide an interesting light source and potential creative aspect to the images.  Third, as usual, I really need to figure out the best ways to deal with focus issues, between focusing in the dark and being able to stop down the camera.  I feel some of these shots might have been quite successful if they had been in focus.  As the sun came up we were eventually able to use the dawn light, but it felt rushed, and to be honest, a bit uninspired. Aloyse and I have been doing this type of work for years now and it is easy to fall back on what we know.  I am hoping over the next few weeks we will be able to really push things to the next level.

Given the absolute darkness, I felt very rusty out there and unsure of what I wanted to accomplish.  I am working on exploring the aspects of location and self, but I am still having a tough time deciding what this means.  I feel pretty confident in my ability to create strong images technically, but establishing solid content is proving to be more difficult.  I need to spend more time on the ‘who, what, where, why, when,’ aspect of this project.  Part of the beauty of these images lies in the spontaneity, but I also really need to get out there and be able to direct the scenes.  Thankfully, Aloyse has a great natural feel for this type of performance work and we were able to get something accomplished before the sun rose.

After all was said and done these were the strongest images from last night.   I personally feel the last image works best, but I include all so that you can compare and see how the project comes along over the next few months.