Prosaic Manhattan In The Wake of 9-11, A Photo essay

I shot all of these with film. Some with 35mm, some with medium format with a vintage German-made accordion camera that once belonged to my father. 

My friend David Wilcox processed and printed the negatives on matte-finish paper. I then paired the prints before I scanned them hoping to get a grainy look and create something both cohesive and ambiguous. 

My challenge was to not use flash and to shoot as much as possible in low light conditions.

The most difficult element is keeping the camera still while leaving the lens open a long time.

Another challenge is concealing one's cameras and tripods at night, moving about with stealth, not attracting any attention.

Getting on to rooftops was also a challenge, but I was able to on many occasions. There, in silence, I could set up my tripod. I enjoyed opening up a long telephoto and with the lens open pulling back or pushing forward the focus to create the shooting rays effect, as seen above.

I should add, as well, that I shot most of these, if not all, starting within less than a month of the 9-11 event. The city was less crowded, still reeling, and there was no shortage of neighborhoods that hadn't as yet recovered a sense of normalcy, so to speak.

I avoided places where I knew the growing amounts of tourists to the city, in a great and sincere show of sympathy after 9-11, would visit. I carried this nagging worry that the city I was looking at night after night, trying to capture, would soon vanish. And in many ways it did. 

Juxtapositions, character references, amusements, necessities, trademarks and institutions and the moon visible by day.

Bending light, fractured contrasts, weird images from a past era that lasted longer than anyone expected, the ongoing thrum of metamorphosis that is a city awake and asleep.

Tourist sites that were rapidly becoming yesterday's news. Public telephones.

Light and shadow on period walls. That which might not last or is certainly about to vanish, though it changes everything while it's around.

The last vestiges of a music scene, a place such as the Iridium during the time Les Paul ceased playing there once a week. 

Or the music shop pictured below, Rod Baltimore's, which I'm not sure exists any longer.

What I didn't want to photograph were the pictures of missing people, their faces tacked to walls. Or all the vigil candles and memorial bouquets and little shrines on front stoops throughout the city. 

Or that big hole in the ground where people I knew well, one of them a family member, were working each day, doing their part to clean up the mess, tend to the wound. 

The opportunities were there, but so were all the others with cameras and curious eyes and increasingly popular phones. I told myself I'd let them shoot those images. I was after something else. And not with a phone. And not digital.

Something more prosaic, you could say. 

People getting on with their lives. Businesses gasping, shaken, but opening their doors again.

In some ways, the city didn't change at all. It kept motoring along indifferent to whatever I thought or said about it. People quickly put themselves back on track and returned to work, as I did too. 

Starting in September 2001, fourteen nights after the towers went down, I shot roll after roll, night and day, over a period of about five years. I watched some businesses fade or disappear, and I saw a slow resurrection occur, as well. 

There was nature to be found in Manhattan, as well. As Roger Tory Peterson, for one, found it in Brooklyn.

The 2003 ICOP show, its brochure as I photographed it above, featured one of my favorite Manhattan night photographers, the inimitable Weegee. In this case, his trick photography was being featured. 

The other artist celebrated in this show, William Henry Fox Talbot, doesn't get enough credit for being one of the original founders of photography as an art form. 

Finally, there was Bruce Davidson's compelling photos from a period, the American Civil Rights Era, during which I was an infant still in nappies. It's an important period nonetheless, and Davidson's photos remain compelling.   

If these appear slightly scratchy, it's because I scanned them not directly from the negatives but from small prints that David Wilcox and I made first on matte paper in the lab that David managed. We wanted the dirtied-film look, as it were. A certain roughness. Call it grit, if you will.