A Walk On The West Side

Manhattan's Upper West Side stretches from 59th street up to 125th street. It's bounded on the west by 11th avenue up to 72nd street and then Riverside Drive, and on the east by Central Park West. Within that area there are many different neighborhoods, beginning with Lincoln Center and ending with Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. The main artery through the center of the area is Broadway. I've known the area well for many years - all of my violin teachers lived in the area, my graduate school (Manhattan School of Music) was at the upper end, and I performed and rehearsed countless times at Lincoln Center. It's a pulsating area for street photography, especially in the ten blocks from 72nd street up to 82nd street were Fairway Market, Citarella's, and Zabars are located. And there are many used book vendors lining the sidewalk.

I've never really spent time there with a camera in hand, but yesterday evening I had the opportunity. As well as I know the area, it felt totally new to me when I was looking for images. Friday evening is a prime time to walk the streets. Broadway, Columbus avenue, and Amsterdam avenue are lined with restaurants with al fresco dining, and the bars are just beginning their weekend jangle. And the women, fuggedaboudit! It's a subject I plan to explore exhaustively.

A New Torah

This past Saturday I took a walk in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. It's an area of old warehouses and worn down residence buildings. Perfect for an artists' community with reasonably priced space to live and large open industrial areas for studios. So the artists in New York have made it home, for now. But this is the beginning of an established pattern in the city. Artist colony encourages art gallery owners to open branches which brings crowds of people who want to have a bite to eat so restaurants open which is then followed by real estate developers who buy up the land and build residential buildings in which artists can't afford to live or create. Gentrification.

Back to my camera. I changed the battery in my Fuji X-T1 and when I turned the camera on, all my settings were gone. I reset them and went not-so-merrily on my way. A while later I turned the camera off to save battery power, and when I turned it on - no settings again. I tested this out a few more times after I got home. And it continued.

Not good, I had an important event to shoot on Sunday (the finishing of a new Torah, hence the title of the blog). I used my Fuji X-Pro1 body which has become my backup camera. It worked fine, and I was happy to have it in hand again, but definitely a bit slower than the XT1. I called Fuji on Monday and brought the camera to the repair facility in NJ. Tuesday afternoon they called to have me pick it up, all fixed. The backup battery was failing and since it's a permanent part of the camera's mother board, that had to be replaced. As a consolation prize (the camera is only five months old) they gave me a new battery. Can never have enough batteries for the Fuji X series cameras.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Fuji support is exemplary.

Now about the new Torah. The story I was told is this: A gentleman named Morris Brenner (87 years old) was a young boy in the Warsaw Ghetto when the Nazis broke through the resistance. They came to his house and rounded up his family to be shipped to Auchwitz for extermination. Morris hid in a closet and wasn't found, but he saw the Nazis empty all the books and the family Torah into a bin and set them on fire. For many years he wanted to make up for the destruction of the holy scrolls, so he purchased a Torah that was made in Israel, had it brought to NYC, and donated it to his local synagogue on the Lower East Side, which just happens to be the synagogue with which I've been involved to make pictures for the past year.

The actual installation of the Torah in the synagogue happened today, the first day of Shavuot. It's the Jewish holiday that commemorates Moses going up on Mt. Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments - 50 days after the exodus from Egypt began (which is celebrated on Pesach). Because it was a significant Jewish Holiday I wasn't allowed to take pictures - it's considered work - yet. Next week another Torah is being installed in the last surviving Yeshiva on the Lower East Side, and I've been promised access to that event. It's a joyous occasions, I'm sure there will be many photos.

More about Sunday: The Torah doesn't become a holy (Kosher) document until it's complete. So the last few lines of the last piece of parchment in the scroll is only sketched in by the original scribe (called a Sofer in hebrew) and the final writing is left to the local Sofer in the community and the congregants to finish.

Here's what the last few lines look like:

It's upside down because the scroll was facing away from me, but you can see the last few lines are just sketched in. This is Morris Brenner, the donor of the Torah, and Rabbi Spiegel's son Yankele.

Rabbi Spiegel with a quill pen writing one of the letters of the last line while being supervised by the sofer, Rabbi Eisenbach.

Just For Fun Today

Took a walk just for the hell of it, today. Needed to deliver some prints in Greenwich Village, and I stopped into a gallery to see some photos. Then went out to shoot. I had the Fuji hand grip on my X-T1 (not the battery grip) for the first time, and because it was a gray day I used the 23mm f1.4 lens to optimize flexibility with the flat light. Because of the extremely shallow depth of field, I find it difficult to work with the aperture wide open. So that's what I did, set the f stop to 1.4.

I thought the hand grip would give me a bit more traction with the camera, but I didn't like the extra weight. Since the grip is fastened with an allen screw, and I didn't have the wrench with me I was stuck with it for the afternoon, but when I got home I took the grip off to remind myself of how the camera handled without it. I guess it depends on the size of one's hand, but I really don't need it. I may sell it down the road.

The experiment at f1.4 was a challenge because the focus has to be spot on, which is difficult with moving subjects. But this guy wasn't going anywhere.

New York Is A Summer Festival

Once the weather gets warm the weekend streets of New York turn into a stream of block parties. This past weekend there were parades and street fairs all over, causing major traffic problems. I had a chance to walk through the Ninth Avenue Food Festival, which stretched from 42nd to 57th street along Ninth Avenue. When it first began this event was a celebration of the many varieties of ethnic restaurants that line the avenue. Each would have a presence on the street. Nowadays, the restaurants all have sidewalk tables set up, but the vendors that take over the street are all concessions that appear at every street fair in every neighborhood of the city. No matter, it was mobbed on Saturday. And I enjoy taking shots of people stuffing their faces.

A Different Bit of History

For my series of photographs centering on the Jewish community of New York's Lower East Side, I visited Nathan Hilu who lives in a senior citizen facility in the neighborhood. Nathan was a part of the daily minyan that met every day at the Roumanian American Congregation on Rivington Street, and his artwork was on display there.

He was an American soldier at the end of World War II, and was assigned to be a security guard at the Nuremberg War Trials in 1945-46. Specifically, Nathan was one of the guards for Field Marshall Herman Goering. He had quite a few stories to tell during my two hour visit. His artwork has been displayed at many museums. Currently his drawings are part of the permanent collection of the Hebrew Union College in Manhattan, and the Queensboro Community College Holocaust Museum in Queens.

Nathan Hilu in 1994:

And in his studio apartment at the senior citizens facility:

Photography History

I began my photography studies as an extension division student at the Parsons School of Design which was the art division of the New School in New York City. The chairman of the photography department was documentary photographer Benedict Fernandez, who had been the teacher of my photo teacher. So I had a direct connection to Ben. After I left my day job as a systems analyst for a Wall Street commercial bank (the only 'straight' job I ever had - thank God!) Ben, through my teacher, made it possible for me to travel to Moscow as part of a group of students with a grant from Nikon/Time Magazine to produce an individual project.  That was my first immersion into the world of documentary work. After a time I lost touch with Ben, but ran into him again in 2007 at the Photo Expo in New York. He gave me the opportunity to put on a solo show of my work at his gallery in Hoboken, NJ - The Almanac Gallery. Over the course of his long career as a photographer and educator, Ben has facilitated the same kinds of opportunities for many photographers.

Ben has a show of his work dating from the 1960's - 70's at the Bronx Documentary Center, and was featured this past week on the New York Times Lens Blog. This past Friday I attended the opening of his show at the Documentary Center where I took some pictures of Ben (surprise, surprise, eh?) entertaining the crowd with stories of a bygone era.

A New Project and Two Pics

This past weekend I began walking around a different part of New York City and the wheels began to churn. I saw possibilities popping up all around me. I was buzzing with excitement as ideas began to coalesce. When I talked with my mentor this evening about it, even he got excited (and believe me, that's saying something). So, as one project winds down, another evolves.

I spent the day yesterday, Holocaust Rememberance Day, at the Holocaust Museum in New York. I'd been past the building several times but couldn't bring myself to go in. Yesterday, however, being a special day, the museum had several Holocaust survivors present to talk with young teenagers who were visiting the museum on class trips. Very difficult shooting conditions, but I may have one or two images that worked.

The first of two images was shot at the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue:

The second was a serendipitous moment as I walked on Lexington Ave. one day last week: