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A Real Rain
A QUICK TRIP TO LOWER MANHATTAN WITH A MEDIUM FORMAT CAMERA
After 6 shoots in 3 days, doing god’s work with a camera in NYC, I had a day off. I had the Hasselblad X2D with me, an overly-qualified companion. The entrance at 72nd and Broadway is a brick building, low and solid, situated and angled in a concrete island. Pigeons and performers surround it feeling too ancient and pleasant for its purpose. I thought about photographing it, but didn’t.
By Columbus Circle, I was already in a mind loop, like a Central Park carriage horse, so far from the patchwork fields of Lancaster. Had I brought the camera, or had it brought me?
After two high resolution architectural observations, it was clear this was the sort of day where the more you see, the less is revealed. All the sky, all the shadow, so much detail in every reflection, but no answers on the meaning of anything. I still didn’t know entirely why I was here.
As I was aimed toward one of Downtown Manhattan’s newest structures, I ran into its handsome and impressive architect doing errands in perfect stride with the very echo of a cold spring day, herself — the kind of heady confluence that only happens in New York. We had mutual friends, had spent a few new years eves together, he called me during my treatments and I remembered how solid and stable an…
