Infrared - of course.  I miss my camera. 

There’s one incident in New York (I think it was New York) that I can’t get out of my mind - and that’s the guard at a Walmarts that was trampled to death by a crowd looking for bargains on Black Friday.  They call it Black Friday because that’s when the retailers are supposed to get into the black ink; but the obvious irony of Christmas shoppers killing a man gives Black Friday an awful connotation.  It made me think about my own Christmas experiences.

We were brought up in a pretty left-wing Jewish household, where the idea of religion being the opiate of the masses was taken seriously.  Nevertheless, my younger sister loved Christmas - and although my parents weren’t crazy about it, they allowed her to set up a small Christmas tree every year; and we all bought Christmas presents for each other.

We had to hide the tree when my grandparents came by.  We hid a lot of things when they came by.  My father’s favorite food was ham.  It still is.  We ate bacon whenever we could.  (I still do.)  And so the whole relgious thing was a hodgepodge for us.  My grandparents would stop by and give us Hanukah gelt - which is a small amount of money; and when the holidays coincided, we’d have a menorah burning in the kitchen on the washing machine; and the small tree with candy canes and glittery stuff in the living room. 

I remember one year, when my Irish neighbors gave us a big cooked ham which took up most of the fridge.  My father’s parents made an unexpected visit, and while my sister was hiding the tree, my father was running around the house looking for a spot to stash the giant ham.  He ended up putting it - unwrapped -  on the kitchen fire-escape.  Then closed the kitchen curtains.  We had breakfast with my grandparents at the kitchen table with the ham on the fire-escape.  I remember taking a peek at it to discover that two pigeons were pecking away at it.  My dad got his parents out of the kitchen; I got the big ham inside, and ended up hiding it under the Christmas tree in my darkroom.  The apartment had two bathrooms, and the second one was my darkroom, and the place to hide stuff in.  So as you can see - photography and relgion have always been connected for me.

Something from a Beatle song when I see this… “Good mornin’, Good mornin’, Good Mornin’” and the sound of a rooster crowing.  And also Robin Williams!

At the nexus, plexus, and sexus of the bridges.

p.s. I’m moving the images around in the photo store… so don’t freak if you see a bunch of missing images tonight.  DB

1991 - View Camera.  I used one of the wooden Wistas back then.  That’s what I used for Poets Walk, Night Storm, Subway Car Interior and a few others that are in the store all these years.  It was called a field camera, but the front of the thing really did blow in the breeze and you had to be careful with long exposures. 

I do wonder these days what would happen if you took it into Grand Central and put a black cloth over your head.  I imagine swat teams would swarm on you from all directions.  I doubt that anyone these days can imagine what it was like to take the thing into a subway car on a tripod and shoot with it - which I did.  (The empty subway car shot) for one; but I have many others where the cars are filled with passengers.  I suspect that even in those days - you had to be a bit cracked in the head to do that.

I do remember getting one ticket from a cop when I did the shot of the arches in the entrance of Grand Central Station.  Yes, you could get a permit - and sometimes I would do that - but they were restrictive in that they always wanted you to fill in the time you would be shooting and the exact location.  There was a little office in Grand Central where you could get the permit.  Maybe it’s still there.

As I write the date of the picture, I realize that many of the blog readers weren’t even born when this shot was taken and in a few years - young photographers will only know the digital world.  I’m sure there will be as many good digital photographers as there were good film photographers - I don’t think the percentage of creative shots will change and that it’s always a bell curve.  Just something to think about I guess.