Last August, I was on the hunt for other quarry in a kind of weekend-long photographic scavenger hunt with about twelve other people and led by Aline Smithson when I heard music. I did what any self-respecting Alice In Photographic Wonderland would do. I tapped my way down the hill (quasi-sensible rubber industrial high heels and all), through the pleasant evening humidity, and towards the local Ampitheatre….
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Within the supersonic jumble of our moment, we find ourselves defining and redefining our individuality through how and where we choose to meet large forces: the digital onslaught, the tyranny of innovation, and the great sentient shadow of surveillance. To name a few. Religion used to be the go-to when this kind of push came to shove. But the quality of encounter we used to delegate to the priestly has gone 360. It has broken through its container. We could meet the new transcendence at arguably, almost every day and anywhere….
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Above the Central Park Entrance at Columbus Circle
Easter on 59th Street
Back East in mid-April, I spent a few days in my old and forever home Manhattan with friends. We stopped for a quick bite at the sixth floor restaurant at the Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle before I caught a cab back to JFK. Yeah, believe me, I know and quite deeply that JFK is a pain, but please allow me to point out that once you leave the city some of your choices may be limned with the light of limitation, whose glow can cast a great pure magic and delight over the secret mundane details of your life.
Facing North-Easty and tucked in the corner of the dining room's long curved window wall, I found myself more or less face to face with Columbus himself. Egads! So I took out my camera as I ate a little tiny lobster roll (it was quick) and imbibed the sort of fantastic elderflower soda that you might more generally find on menus in my still-quirky-if-ominously-monetizing Portland, or poured from a vintage bottle spiked with the local moonshine and a messy bouquet of glorious wild herbs in someone's kitchen in the north of Ibiza.
Where's our man Columbus? Well, I haven't quite processed that one yet. But the relative lack of human presence on the West Side on that Saturday afternoon before Easter "there's no one here, there's no one here," my friend kept on saying as I sipped and peered, combined with beautiful light on the still mostly naked and always so so graceful early spring branches, made for this image of the West 59th Street Park entrance.