garrison beau scott

Man…I remember it as if it were yesterday, even though it was over 11 years ago. Damn.

But I suppose if you had every nerve ending hooked up to a lightning bolt and decided to stand in a puddle of water, you’d remember that feeling a hundred years later.

As a photographer making my first trip to the city, that’s kind of what it felt like. It’s very cool for me to look at the proof sheets from that glorious week I spent there, and re-live the stories and the sequence of events that led from one picture to another.

I had just resurfaced after a ride on the subway and was getting my bearings when I felt a rush of urgency push past me. It was one of those things where you look, too late, behind you, as that’s where the push had come from, but the energy was moving too fast to see it, so you had to look around to find what it was that lit your senses up. When I turned around, I found this guy.

Forget about getting my bearings, this guy was my bearings, my compass, my path for as long as it took. I caught up to him after a half block or so and tried to match his pace without being noticed. It was hard not to get distracted by how cool he was, by how his attitude poured out of his creepers, shot out of his cigarette, creating a wake that washed over the litter of New York’s streets. He owned the fuckin’ place. At least he acted like he did, and I was a believer.

The thing about shooting people when they’re walking, and don’t know you’re trying to get a picture, is to capture them just as their legs have hit the longest part of the stride, anything else looks like they’re dancing, standing on one leg, or about to tip over. That’s what makes this shot work, other than the coolness quotient being blown to Mars courtesy of the subject. I just got lucky there was a complimentary shadow provided by a parked car to balance things out. Not to mention the Bud sign in the upper right corner. You think this guy drinks wine coolers?

After I got the shot, I sped up and walked past him, just wanting to see who he was. And as I was passing him, I looked down into his left hand and saw that he had a copy of the Village Voice in his hand.

I wonder if he got the gig.

Survival. If you want a prime example I guess you could travel to the Gobi Desert, or the Arctic Circle, or maybe even to the Galapagos Islands and find some amazing example of a living thing surviving against all odds.

Or you could go to New York City and study some of the trees that carve out a meager existence among all the concrete.

I’ve said it here before, but it bears repeating, I love to walk. Especially in a new city. And in the summer of 1996, New York was a new town for me and my camera. So often I’d get caught up in how much was above me. The sheer size of this city that exists above our heads is overwhelming. But more often than not, what makes this place so incredibly amazing are the people who are walking along side you. Fortunately in my doe-eyed wonder at being in the Apple for the first time, and gazing skyward at all the scrapers, I never bumped into any of the city’s inhabitants.

However, I did manage to look down every so often at the right time to witness the beauty and diversity of the population, summed up here in the best way I could manage. Granted, in a 125th of a second it’s hard to get a definitive read on a person, let alone two, but I think there are enough visual clues to start putting together a list of what makes them as different as night and day.

Photography is equal parts faith and voodoo. Faith is knowing the picture will come, voodoo is turning around in time to see it.

Or something like that. I came up with that thought in 1996 after I made this photo. It was on my first trip to NYC and I had been shooting for a few days when I wandered past this wall with all of these square openings fronting the sidewalk. I thought it could be an interesting shot if I were to position myself on the dark side of the wall, wait for a person to walk past the opening on the sidewalk side of the wall, and frame their head in the opening.

During the wait, I began to wonder about the ideal subject. Who would make the most interesting image, who would be able to pull off the image? Maybe it was having just been to B & H Photo, but I almost immediately thought about a Hasidic man as being the most iconic of people and began to wait. There were a few close calls, but both times my would-be subject crossed the street literally right before the opening.

After about 45 minutes and a few frames of other subjects in front of the openings, I was about to call it quits when I heard someone walking behind me. It was this gentleman. Voodoo.

When I finally made it to New York, after stops in Kansas City and New Orleans and an excruciatingly long turn through the south, I was quite literally the wide-eyed kid in the big city. Everything around me was bigger and I was much, much smaller.

But it didn’t take long for me to start working on getting the balance a bit evened out, though no one, save perhaps Sinatra and a few other choice people, could ever hope to equal this city. Now, I said “working on” getting the balance evened out, not actually doing any balancing, there’s a difference. But none the less, I tried.

I was the guest of some very gracious hosts while in Gotham, the ideal kind of hosts for a trip like this and an explorer such as myself. They pointed me in directions, told me how the subway worked and set me on my way. And at night after a long day of walking and taking snaps, they took me out for beers. Bless you Tim, Wally and Whit, bless you. And so I walked, and walked, and rode plenty of Subway trains, lamenting as I write this the loss of tokens for the switch to those plastic cards.

I spent so much time on subway platforms that I began to see a pattern in the exposure. On the Greyhound trip I used only one camera (OM-2) and one lens (35mm) and just one emulsion (TMZ). And then, about two days into my stay, as I was about to descend onto the platform, it dawned on me that whenever I was down there, I needed to shoot wide open at 1/30th of a second. And if I was going to make good on my photographic education, I should probably put this revelation to use.

So here I am, about to walk down to catch a train, the light bulb having just popped on over my head and I stop to make the adjustment. As soon as I look up from my camera, I saw her.