And as general photographic advice, that’s not a bad good way to approach projects: Research, research, research, planning, planning, planning, then grab the unexpected opportunities as you can…

Speaking of Gladdy though, is he okay? I now realize he’s been missing from comments for a while now. I hope you’re well, John.

It took me a good while to comment on your essay, and I’ve surely watched it 20 or 30 times now. I really like this concept a lot. The fab opening shot already carries a lot of the story, and there are several pictures in your essay that stayed with me for a good while. As a visual visitor, in almost every essay you get to that point when you wonder why a certain picture was included (or what the missing link in your own head might be not to understand…). That’s what happened to me with some of the pictures in your essay. Until I find out, I strongly believe that it would be a shame if you did not get back on that bus every single rainy day of the next say six months.
Again, I love what I see here. Hope to talk with you about this one soon – in person” ;-)
All the best from over here, Dominik.

That is true, many of us could have shot this,..but didn’t. It is original, entertaining, makes an interesting statement, and gives food for thought. I say bravo Michael.

We were a cold, crowded, faceless mass huddled ineffectually under sacks of shapeless saran wrap which failed to either hide our miserable sodden rags or prevent our flesh from spoiling, despite the chilly clime. A bleak sky pelted us with a grey caustic liquid that fell equally upon those victim-citizens far below as they struggled helplessly through their dogged routines. Every minute massive concrete slabs imperiled us on all sides as we belched and rumbled through the wet, greasy, filthy avenues, far below. Occasionally a passer-by looked up to face our threatening juggernaut of smoking steel tearing down upon them, and then in passing, our myriad gazes of privileged voyeuristic ambivalence. Our gazes were met defiantly, or alternately, with an intensely personal dispassion, a kind of insult by omission. Those faces reverberate now in my minds eye as through cataracts, naked and revealing, but blurred and unrecognizable.

But Webster drove on. A night as black as any I have ever endured enshrouded us in a cloying grip that stifled the very air, if it can called air, more like a noxious vaporous thing lurking just out of view. In these neighborhoods, impenetrable but for the electric lights blaring a cacophonous music spewing from every fixture, every moving object, every static aperture. A warped palette of urban neon stretched across the twisted, soggy blackness, winking and strobing, insinuating a kind of civility, a domesticity, a placid repose that lay upon the ragged escarpments like canvas.

Finally, we penetrated through the night and roared into the daytime hubbub of shackled and fenced-off work sites, stacks of rocks boxed and filed amid flapping ID badges, unbreakable hats and neon clothing. And always the smoke, the smoking, the smokers. That morning, if morning it was, Webster brought us back to earth amid green gardens swaddled tenderly in hardscape, where children darted for safety from their exposed positions on the playgrounds. A hopeful message, scrawled and nearly mis-spelled upon a wall, ready to fall: READ. I callously conjured a postscript: ..AND RIGHT! Who are these people? These denizens of decay, these multicolored army-ants building up from the litter, scrabbling hopefully up from far below us?

I paid the fare. I took the ride. Now I will reap what we have sown. Yes, we. I admit some small affinity, some second-cousin-kinship with those creatures strewn helplessly below us on our brief sojourn through what is, for me, a foreign land. I doubt they would reciprocate, but that’s another photo-essay. Mostly I will wonder. A wonderment unanswered for the most part, like a brief glimpse captured forever but never completely revealed: A smoking hand, trapped by a red door, an altercation, average in it’s implacable frustration, and that blatant performance of public joy, an irrepressibly tender humanity exposed by 2 copulating skeletons.

That was quite ride, thanks Mr. Webster.

Regarding showing more pictures (thanks everyone for asking), my policy on published essays has always been to not do that. It’s very tempting but I put a lot of effort into the editing and all those other pictures were cut for a reason. I do have quite a few fairly interesting shots left from this project though. I did, for example, take a lot of pics of the huddled tourists facing the camera. The same scene as the opening shot with the tourists’ faces and the bridge behind them is a nice composition (wedding photographers take note). But for the purposes of the story it was important to for me to objectify the tourists, to turn them into symbols. When you see their faces they become people. And in many shots they could be perceived as looking somehow ridiculous. I felt that by far the most dangerous cliche in a project like this would to in any way be perceived as ridiculing the tourists. It was very important they be portrayed with dignity. And then there was another little sub-plot that got cut entirely. Some of those pics may show up elsewhere as you wouldn’t be able to tell they were part of this. Maybe on Burn Diary, eh.

Anyway, I sympathize with your plight Paul. Taking pictures of people who don’t want to have their picture taken is by far the worst part of this profession. It drove me away for many years and I try to avoid it as much as possible. Are there any nearby towns? I don’t know about other photographers, but I almost never take pictures in my own neighborhood. Don’t want strangers who know where I live to see my cameras for one thing. But it’s more than that. You might consider a step ladder.

Bill, your relationship with the bridge photo makes me very happy. Those kinds of connections are what make looking at photography (and other arts) so worthwhile. And you’re right, I didn’t make that connection or even the one to the roller coaster, which now seems obvious. I just saw colors and lines and shapes and symbols (that would be an interesting conversation sometime; what we see when photographing. I rarely see the details of what’s actually happening when I take a picture). I will certainly tell my daughter. I know she remembers the night we saw your slideshow fondly and she read your blog when you wrote about your real-life part in the events depicted in the movie. Do you know when it comes out on DVD or will be available on NetFlix? I added it to my queue but there’s no release date.

Finally, I hope my responding and continuing to talk about this work at such lengths is not unseemly. I don’t know the best way to approach these things. My default attitude is to say nothing (which I managed in the artist statement, bio, and captions), certainly not to explain the meaning of the work, but I thought I’d try different things with this particular opportunity.

Nice to see you round here at last!

Bob, yes, I picked up on your word goof right away, but it didn’t bother me. I kind of liked it. And I make so many typos and word goofs myself. I just remain blown away by your analogy. I am probably the only one here who has actually ridden to the very back of the leviathan with whale hunters (not fishermen, David – hunters… never call them fishermen! No… no… no!) and yet I did not make that visual link, but you did.

I doubt that Mike did, either, but now, every time I look at the picture, I see the symbolism… the whale breaching in the buttress ahead, the intensity of the hunters focused on it…

So… Mike’s picture + Bob’s words and my own personal experiences has produced what for me is a highly symbolic image from my own life. Before I read Bob’s words, I found the image interesting and I kept wanting to liken it to something, but I could not think what. I thought it must be something from New York City that I had seen pictured before, but could come up with nothing.

Turns out, it was Arctic Alaska, the whole time.

Please share this story with your daughter, Mike.

Another thing is that different people have different favorites, so although this one or that one don’t do anything for you, someone as equally discerning may find them appealing. David, for example, thought #2 was easily the best when we had our little editing session. The consensus, outside of #1 seems to be #5 and #16, both of which I considered not including at various times — #5 because I felt sorry for the poor woman who’s probably still seeing stars from that flash, #16 just because. Of course I bring my own hangups to the mix. My favorite (outside of #1) is easily #3. I like #s 14 and 18 a lot as well, which I suspect would be the first two most people voted off the island. And then there’s #11 which has nothing to do with the story at all, and probably contradicts it. But how can I not include fucking skeletons? I have to think of Akaky.

Anyway, what I appreciate most about your comment is that you have high expectations for me. That was truly a pleasant surprise. Hopefully my future work will better live up to your expectations. And just to be clear, no sarcasm whatsoever is intended in that statement. I genuinely appreciate your giving some thought to this.

Thanks for answering my question….and as I said, it does not change anything for me.
What you wrote is the type of thing I love to read about work I don’t really understand.
You explained but left room for interpretation.
I think what you have done is fresh and not cliche…you had an idea and went for it and now it’s here.
We are seeing what they missed.
To borrow Kubrick’s words….we are not seeing with eyes wide shut.

it’s great to hear you voice now here standing (or rather sitting) along side those dripping ponchos :)))))

New York started out as a visual idea, and it wasn’t titled “New York.” For years I’d been fascinated by the tourists on those buses in their cheap plastic ponchos and always told myself that some rainy day I’d explore the idea. Then a project I was planning in the midwest fell through and I was stuck in New York with a lot of free time on my hands. I checked the weather forecast and it was supposed to rain for the next few days so I said what the hell and bought a three day pass. The working title at that point was “Staycation.”

Of course I am a narrative photographer and not particularly interested in singles. Were that not so, I could have quit once I got #8, which is pretty much what I had in mind at the outset. But I had to have some story structure, however inane, to work within. So I thought about the tourists saw — Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, 30 Rock, etc., and thought it would be funny to photograph the things they didn’t see that were right in front of them. Never did I consider the possibility that this would be a publishable project. These would just be walking around photos, only I’d be sitting instead, and on high. The whole idea sounded cliched. You know how I feel about cliches.

But I stayed up late the first night processing the photos, creating a little slideshow and obsessively watching it, or as I like to call it: editing. It was sometime around 3 am when I saw the story I wanted to tell. A shot of the huddled tourists reminded me of a scene from one of Jose Saramago’s novels. Like the image of glistening plastic ponchos that got me started, it was a visual idea, not a language-based narrative. But unlike the ponchos, it gave me a visual framework in which to explore the idea about what the tourists don’t see. The working title at that point was “Blindness.” Or “Seeing.” I could never quite get that straight.

And either way, it was a horrible working title that I felt was cliched and terribly distorted the story I was trying to tell. This became apparent when I tried to write the intro. As Burn readers know, many a good photo essay is ruined by its accompanying text and the crap I was writing for this one would have carried on that ugly tradition. I had been working with a professional writer on my Brooklyn Carnival project and it occurred to me to do the same with the New York photos “New York photos,” btw, was David’s term for this series and I got in the habit of referring to them like that as well. It slowly morphed into becoming my third (or fourth, depending on how you count them) working title. Anyway, when I thought about professional writers, Roy Edroso jumped immediately to mind because he is such a consumate New Yorker, and one of my favorite writers on the web. I was thrilled when he agreed to do it and thought his essay the perfect intro for the piece.

Of course Roy’s interpretation of the story is not the story I am telling. My work with professional writers on these two projects got me thinking more about the whole intro thing so I did a brief little study of how outside writers typically handle them. Charles Bowden’s intro for Ken Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion” is a good example. It deals more with Bowden’s personal relationship with the work than the work itself. Apparently, that’s a common strategy for literary intros. I’m playing with it myself (and right before your very eyes, ha).

Anyway, at some point between adopting “New York photos” as the latest working title and getting a Real New Yorker to write about the series, it occurred to me to just name the thing “New York.” I laughed out loud when I thought of it. I’m smiling right now. But underneath the joke lie some essential truths. Roy and Bob Black have explored more than a few of them. My questioning of what the tourists see and don’t see explores a few others. The tour bus companies do it in their own way. The images they sell of “New York” are in many ways for many people definitive. Of course people like me and Roy and Bob and no doubt you, discerning reader, have different definitions. Or perhaps we reject definitions altogether, they being little more than walls that separate the blind from the seeing, or in this case, the tourists from the city.

“Say to a blind man, you’re free, open the door that was separating him from the world, Go, you are free, we tell him once more, and he does not go, he has remained motionless there in the middle of the road, he and the others, they are terrified, they do not know where to go, the fact is that there is no comparison between living in a rational labyrinth, which is, by definition, a mental asylum and venturing forth, without a guiding hand or a dog-leash, into the demented labyrinth of the city, where memory will serve no purpose, for it will merely be able to recall the images of places but not the paths whereby we might get there.”

― José Saramago

yes, absolutely saw the RollerCoaster too! :))…but then felt they’re fisherman…must be the sailor/whaler in me more than the thrill seeker ;))…

never over-analyze, just write what i feel and see when looking, you know me ;))