This one just smacked me in the face as soon as I turned the corner. With shots like these my only real issue is exposure. Other than that it’s point and shoot. The elongated scene made using 35mm. a no brainer. So I fired a frame using the OM-2 and then floated on up those stairs.
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.
