NYC Comic Con 2013

Five days setting up the new computer and installing all my applications kept me off the streets and without a camera in hand. I headed into New York on Saturday with no particular plan or location in mind, but when some ghouls and zombies got on the train I remembered that Comic Con was happening at the Javitz Center. It was a prelude to Halloween. I got out of my comfort zone and shot with the intention of processing in color. The costumes were imaginative, and mostly self-created, and everyone was there to be seen - AND PHOTOGRAPHED! What fun!

I figured, what the hell, as long as I'm shooting and processing for color, why not play with Color Efex Pro 4. So here's some of the results (more to come):

All Set and Ready To Go

New iMac is set up and I've been processing some photos to see about the performance with the new fusion drive. The whole week has been devoted to computer stuff, so I haven't been out to shoot at all. Hoping to get out on Saturday. For now I've been going back through my photos for the past year and processing images that I always thought I wanted to get to, and never did. It's a good thing to do periodically, and I really need to delve back into my film negative archive to review work I shot twenty years ago - more on that in the next blog entry.

I shot this on Ninth Avenue on my way back to Penn Station - part of my Men With Cigars series. Doing my usual processing took about one quarter of the time as on my older machine. the RAM (8g) and fusion drive really speed things along. I'm getting used to the wireless keyboard and mouse that came with the iMac. The keyboard feels a little small, and if I were writing another book it would definitely be restricting. The top of the mouse is actually a track pad, and that's really nice so that when I'm scrolling through material I don't have to move my hand back and forth.

The Manhattan Diaspora project is taking on a life of its own and expanding. Lots of work to do, and it's exciting. M(ore) T(o) C(ome).

Big News .... For Me, Anyway

Woo Hoo .... I'm spending the day tomorrow setting up my new iMac - 27" screen, fusion drive - it's going to seem blazing fast compared to my current six year old machine.

I've been hard at work on the Manhattan Diaspora 2013 project, and there's been quite a bit of interest in the community. It's nice to be able to invest myself in an effort that I know will be well received. That doesn't happen very often. More to come as things progress, but I think it should take about a year.

Even though it's very time consuming, I still try to get out for casual walks and some shooting fun. Last week after a meeting about the project I walked up Clinton Street to Houston Street to stop into Russ and Daughter for some potato latkes. Alas, I was way too late. They're usually sold out by noontime. So, on to Yona Schimmel's - same story, they were sold out also. I had to settle for a potato knish - poor me, eh?

Even though my thoughts were spinning with all the input from the meeting and my stomach was grumbling in anticipation of the latkes, I was still looking for an interesting street shot. How about this:

Kids Having Fun

The holiday of Sukkah is called a 'festival' because it is a time of rejoicing - for the bountiful fall harvest and for freedom from Egyptian slavery. During the holiday I went to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn which, although it is being gentrified, is a bastion of orthodox Jewery, especially of the intensely devout Satmar sect. At the direction of one of the people I photographed, I sought out a street fair that had everything any street fair in any town in America might have - kids' rides, games of chance, and food stands. And the kids were loving it.

Which reminds me, kids are blank slates. They just do what their biologically programmed to do - have fun. They grow into what we write on those slates. Some of us spend a good part of our lives trying to overcome what was written, and to getting back to having fun.

East Side Glatt

While walking around the Lower East Side, on several occasions I stopped into the East Side Glatt store on Grand Street. It's like focal point of the neighborhood that everyone stops at some time during their week. The first time I saw the store was in August on my first trip back to the neighborhood when I decided to revisit the work I had done of the community twenty years ago. I posted a blog entry about meeting 98 year old concentration camp survivor Max Davidowitz (with whom I hope to spend more time as the project unfolds). The owner of the store invited me to explore the back story (behind the double doors and down the stairs) and take whatever photos I wanted.

This is Baruch Weiss, proprietor of the establishment:

And the charming Eddie Brown, who has lived in the neighborhood his whole life:

And Raphael Estevez - he was kind enough to offer me some of those yummie looking potato latkes that he was cooking up:

But the highlight of any visit to the store is chatting with the social director (and ham - yes, yes, it's a kosher store) Nurit Bendavid, who would never forgive me if I didn't include a photo of her:

 

Season of Jewish Holidays

For the past week I've been loaded with work: photos to edit and process, events to photograph, and meetings about my current project about the Lower East Side. It's good to be busy with what I love to do, but it's kept me from writing on this blog about what I do. I need to write about it - to have some kind of perspective on the whole process.

The real meat of the project is in pursuing the threads of the work I produced twenty years ago when I first began to work on Manhattan Diaspora. After this week when the holidays are over, I'll be able to start in on that. But it seems that as I work along, new avenues open and need to be explored. Besides digging back into the original stream of work, which is centered on the dissolution of the long history of the Jewish Lower East Side, I've decided to explore where it has moved on to: Brooklyn, upstate New York, New Jersey. And as I reconnect with some past acquaintances from the previous work, I'm finding new people, which lead to new directions to explore and gets me deeper into the culture and community.

I hope to be able to eventually have a show of the project - the original photographs shot in 1993-94, and the current work - and hopefully a book to accompany it. I can always dream. Becoming once again deeply invested in a long term project is invigorating, but being invigorated now is quite a bit more taxing physically for me than it was twenty years ago.  Boo hoo .... poor me.

Last week I revisited my friend Sholom Halpert - the Henry Street bookbinder - and received an invitation to visit him in Monroe, NY and to see his Sukkat. I'm hoping to get up there in the next few days. I've heard from several sources that Monroe is rich in subject material. When I was at his shop, Mr. Halpert was repairing and recovering a Talmud (the compendium of Jewish written law) that had been printed in 1860.

I'm hoping to write several more blogposts this week to catch up on material I've been shooting. But then again, I have several more events to shoot this week, so who knows how exhausted I'll be.....

Tradition III

Third in the 'Tradition' series of images I recently shot at Rabbi Lichter's torah repair shop. He was explaining the layout of the handwritten script on the pages of parchment of the scrolls. There is a strict formality to the way the text is inked. The number of characters in each line, the paragraph breaks, and the spacing on each page is discussed in great detail in texts that give the scribe explicit instructions about how any repairs must be done to maintain the sanctity of the scroll.