Street Corner Theater - spring in winter, NYC 2012

East 39th St - Full Metal Jousting

East 31st St. -  DDC

 Madison near East 29th St. - walking the dog

  Broadway and East 20th - Reflections on Mia Hamm

Still walking

Street Corner Theater - in color and black and white

I am trying something that’s different for me. I don’t shoot much black & white anymore. I think about the colors in my photos and whether or not they work as part of the composition. Recently, I’ve been working with a friend and poet, Steve Dalachinsky, on a project which I expect will reach fruition in a few months, at which time I’ll have much more to say about it. Working with him, I’ve needed to switch my mind from color to monochrome, and in looking at and thinking about the photos I’ve made with him, I see there is an alternate way of looking at things, that the textures and density of the image is very different, and the way we respond to the image is different, too.

What does this mean for me right now? It means that I’m going to try something. I am looking at my photos twice and evaluating their impact in color and monochrome. Since it had been a long time since I did anything serious with B&W photography – last using Tri-X and Pan-x in the early part of this century – I wasn’t sure how the project with Steve would turn out, and really, I won’t know until it’s completed; I don’t know how this experiment will work, either.

I’ve selected some street photos and processed them in both monochrome and color. I’ve treated each one without thinking about how it looks in the other format. I’m posting them together, just to see what I see. I already know that some photos are meant to be viewed in color; for some it is simply a matter of different, not necessarily better or worse; some of the photos have a stronger impact in their monochrome version.

I’ll keep thinking about it.
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Street Corner Theater: A New York Moment

A New York Moment – though whenever I’m out on the street in NY, it’s one NY moment after another. 


I’m walking downtown on Madison Avenue. It’s a lovely, sunny Tuesday afternoon. Everyone’s been talking about how weird a winter it’s been, and they’re right. It’s been warm, that’s the first thing, with 60º F weather in February, I mean, that almost never happens. Then there’s been almost no snow, which is a blessing in the city and surrounding suburbs after the disastrous snow we had in October, a storm that brought down trees and knocked out power throughout the tri-state area. There’s been a lot of sun and not too many rainy days, which means I’ve been able to get out with my camera and shoot a lot of pictures I’ll never use. 


So I’m walking down Madison, my camera in my hand, shooting photos of people while all those surveillance cameras are taking videos of me. I get to the corner of East 27th where I grab a few frames of people waiting to cross. I look up and standing outside of a recently opened sports bar which claims to have the most authentic Philly Cheesesteak in NY – personally I don’t know why they don’t call it a NY Cheesesteak since that’s where we are – and by the way, what’s wrong with someone making a Chilly Fees-steak or Chili Free-steak, or something – is a woman with a camera and I’m pretty sure she’s photographing me. I smile, lift my camera to my eye and squeeze off a few rounds – I mean frames – waiting for her to notice that I’m photographing her photographing me, which she does. She brings her camera away from her face, laughs, and then takes a few more. 

As do I. Now anyone who knows me knows I am a friendly, chatty guy, so of course I stop walk over to her and start a brief, amicable conversation. She’s a photographer, she’s visiting from Italy – when she said she was Milanese I could’ve guessed it from how well the coat, the scarf, the sweater, the jeans and the bag complemented each other. I told her that I’m a street photographer; she said she likes to photograph people. We exchanged enough information so we could view each other’s photos.

But there are streets to be walked and people to be photographed, images to reflect on when I look at them later.

Footnote: a couple of days later I got an email from her. She put her photos of me up on her blog. Http://neigedebenedetti.blogspot.com
A true NYC moment.