Over the summer a friend of mine got married. It was a lovely wedding, and a glorious excuse to see friends I haven’t spent time with in person since the Pandemic started.
I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd since high school, and my friend had an extra ticket, so I… thought I… might like to… go to the show.
I went from carrying around a backpack full of camera bodies and lenses everywhere to slinging a compact Fuji with a small prime lens over my shoulder when I leave the house. Apart from having dramatically less back pain, the primary result is the pictures I take when I go to events have become about the experience of going to the event rather than the event itself. Shooting the action on the field gave way to people-watching in the stands, keeping an eye out for the strange and interesting. I liked the former because the predictability meant guaranteed pictures, the latter I am enjoying precisely for its randomness and spontaneity. To paraphrase Cool Lester Smooth, if you shoot baseball, you get pictures of baseballs and baseball players, but if you start to just look around, you don’t know what the fuck you’re gonna see. And that is infinitely more interesting.
Central Park on a mild summer afternoon is an easy place to make images. It’s alive with the full vibrance and diversity of the city, all sharing a common desire to get the hell out for a little bit. The friends I met left early, so I got to wander in aimless solitude, to enjoyable results.
USA Fencing, the governing body of sport fencing for the United States, had exhibition bouts in Grand Central Terminal for a week in late July to promote the sport.
Since my first roll of film in 2008, I’ve shot fencing. As a participant, then a sporadic observer, and most recently as an amused passer-by. A subject once called fencing a kind of physical chess, a back and forth of moves and counter-moves between two opponents. I appreciate the analogy as a fencer, but as a photographer I’d say it’s more like high-impact ballet.
Smoke from wildfires in Canada drifted down to New York City and cast the strangest glow. I detoured from my commute to visit Transmitter Park in Greenpoint and see how distorted the view of Manhattan was. It wasn’t distorted, it was just gone. The air was scratchy even with a mask, dense and quiet. My mind kept going to the images of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, diseased and irradiated, in Blade Runner 2049. And my images went that way, too.
