Schmap me up!

"Riverside Park," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

The picture above is now appearing on Schmap!! New York, a sort of interactive map-travel-guide-with-pictures that you can view on your computer or iPhone. It's one of several photos illustrating Manhattan's Riverside Park. The Schmap editor found it on Flickr & I said OK, use it -- though they weren't paying -- because she asked so nicely & it seemed an unusual choice. Also, I was curious to see it on a cellphone.

Here it is on the schmap.

You probably remember tourists -- their urgent arguments in various languages as they jabbed at ripped maps that flapped in the wind under malfunctioning streelights? Well, that's over. Personally, I thought 20th century tourists were adorable. Their ingratiating smiles & halting, heavily accented questions always made me feel so competent ... But, as I say, that's over. We're onto a new millenium now.

Tomorrow's tourist will have his schmap!! Holding up its self-lighted screen, he will whisk through our city with small deft sweeps of his hand, the occasional masterful finger punch of decision. Imagine. A mere tap & he is virtually soaring -- invisibly, noiselessly -- at attack helicopter height over neighborhoods & parks, highways & bridges. Another tap & he is hovering, exploring -- scrolling through handy pictures and short but informative reviews . Ah, Gotham! What delicious decisions. Times Square! Central Park! Greenwich Village! The undimmable Lights of Broadway! All at his fingertips.

My only problem is -- allright I'll confess it! --I can't make any of these goddamn utopia-is-now gadgets actually work. To give you an example, I tried for an hour & couldn't figure out how to customize the "easy-to-use" widget they sent me to show off my picture. Here, you try it.

I was savvy enough to know the "customizable widget" was part of Schmapp's very smart strategy to not only use my photo for free but also have me do their viral marketing for them. I would, the marketeers hoped, proudly send around e-news of my "publication" to all my friends. 

And I would have done it too. Fired up my Twitter. Digg. LinkedIn. Ning. YouTube. Bebo...

Except I haven't figured out Facebook yet.

Return to realismo

"Chinatown," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

Neo-Neo Realism by film critic A.O. Scott in today's NY Times Magazine is a fine piece about filmmaking, if you can get past the title, which sounds like a joke. It celebrates "...young American directors ... making clear-eyed movies for hard times." Though I haven't heard of most of the movies Scott writes about (I did manage to catch the excellent Half Nelson by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck & hope to see Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy before it disappears), I'm hopeful about the trend.

I fell in love with Italian neo-realismo movies in college, particularly DaSica's Bicycle Thief -- a beautiful movie, somehow hard-edged & lyrical at the same time. The idea of neo-realismo was to tell stories about ordinary people, using mostly non-actors playing parts close to their actual experience & shooting on the streets. After graduating, I tried my hand at this for a couple of years before turning to still photography. I ended up with a 16mm sound film about a hitchhiker, called "Step It Up & Go" -- now mouldering in a canister in my basement.

To be clear: It's not because I don't like big movies that I'm hopeful about a return to realism (which of course never really went away) . In fact, I love escape & I'm a huge fan of the best of Hollywood-style big-budget movies. But I'm easily convinced that it's time for something different as well. Here's Scott:

"...what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism."

Everything is important: Joel Meyerowitz's 'field photographs'

By Joel Meyerowitz, all rights reserved

"While working on the streets of New York with the Leica I began to see that the slowness of color film and therefore the depth of space it rendered, was forcing me to slow down and make photographs from further back than I had before. This slight adjustment of space and time produced a new kind of image for me, one that emptied the center of the frame of its nominal subject, 'the hook' that I had previously built my photographs on, and instead opened the frame to multiple, more fragmentary, simultaneous events. This gave me a new sense of the street as a place where everything was important; the buildings near and far; the movement of people; the basic street furnishings of light poles, phone booths, hydrants, trees, signs, store windows, all of it cohering in a way that broke open the form of my earlier work. I called these new, non-hierarchical pictures, 'field photographs,' because everything in the frame was now in play, and the more complex and open-ended I could make the image the more interesting it became to me. I felt I was testing the descriptive limits of the photograph by asking; how much dissonance can a photograph contain and still be readable? Can interesting pictures be made without depending on a central event to hold it together? What does color mean in a photograph?"
-- Joel Meyerowitz

One of the earliest & best street shooters to use color in the 60s & 70s, Meyerowitz went on to make amazing (& very different) work with an 8 x 10 view camera in the 80s & 90s (see especially Cape Light, one of my all-time favorite books). In the excerpt above he's talking about his earlier fast-moving, jazzy small camera work.

It's been my experience  the "field photograph" he describes so eloquently is nearly unattainable, a kind of holy grail for photographers. Over & over those of us who aspire to such pictures imagine them in  perfected form as we try to shoot them. I wonder:  does Meyerowitz feel he fully succeeded at this kind of picture, even once?

Read the complete interview here.


By Joel Meyerowitz, All rights reserved

Thanks to Hipshots for pointing me to the interview & to Too Much Chocolate for hosting it.

Center winners are in (& I'm not one of them)

From "Journey to Sakhalin," Jurors' Award winner, Michael C. Brown, All rights reserved

I got my email today from Maggie Blanchard at the Center (formerly Santa Fe Center for Photography): "Thank you for submitting to the 2009 Project Competition," she began, and then a few sentences later "...We regret to inform you that your work was not awarded this year."

Thud! Biff! Whomp!

Let's face it, no matter how well I try to insulate myself from disappointment at these moments, no odds, no philosophy can completely defuse the fantasy of ending up in the winners' circle. This time I thought my submission had a chance. Actually, I still think it did. But my project wasn't chosen.

It took me a few hours before I was ready to look at this year's winners. I'm glad to say they're excellent. I'm not even tempted to be snarky -- which is the way my self pity expresses itself in these situations -- or to feel worse because of their success. And that, my friends, is progress...

Take a look at the winning projects.

Echoes

"Sumner, Mississippi," William Eggleston, All rights reserved


"Untitled," Lisa Scheer, All rights reserved

Cardplayers make "Best view"

"Winter cardplayers, Sunset Park," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

My picture of cardplayers was picked up by Best View in Brooklyn, a blog about the Sunset Park area. The publisher/blogger is "female & taken" & has a Flickr site -- that's all we know -- but she presides over a lively & opinionated product that does what good small town newspapers used to do. That is, inform, report, gossip, entertain & occasionally rile up, all on a strictly local scale. Best View is loaded with events calendars, parents' pages, school news, blurbs for local talent, plus lots & lots of pictures, exposes (with more pictures), blogosphere picks & pans, movies, books, restaurant reviews& more... all from a neighborhood slant.

If you're from Sunset Park (which, BTW, DOES have the best view in Brooklyn), check this one out.

Sunday outfit, Brooklyn

Tim Connor, All rights reserved