HDR Photography
Nearly every surface in this image is brick. From the alleyway to the retaining walls to the towers: brick, brick, brick (or pavers). I understand sheathing a structural steel building in glass or densglass or (heaven forbid) “exterior insulation finishing system,” a.k.a. Dryvit, but the kind of person-hours necessary to assemble all of that orderly brick is mind-boggling.
Can a building hide? Or surprise? Or sneak?
The Empire State Building, hiding at the other end of 34th St. in Manhattan, seems to support the possibility. The canonical modern New York street scene, one of luxury cars stuck in traffic and smoke from cooking street meat and old industrial buildings being converted into high-end condos, can still surprise. One step away is another scene built of different buildings and people in view.
This four-story apartment building was so clearly designed to be flanked by siblings of similar stature. It’s now the contrary holdout on a lot dominated by a monster tower block that threatens to engulf it.
The Century is a classic of early-twentieth-century Art Deco styling, but I also appreciate the somewhat understated courtyard that it presents. There’s such great texture in the brick, and the setting looks almost boring until the lovely structures in the windows and their frames become apparent.
The new structures of Hudson Yards are rising above the old rail yard and the old/updated High Line. The mix of old and new is a little obvious, but it’s one of the aspects of New York that I appreciate the most. The same species that made flint hand axes and mastered fire also developed structural steel. Perhaps the High Line’s gravel and 10 Hudson Yards‘s work-in-progress faces represent that.
In in the instant before the train passed under the George Washington Bridge, I took this picture, distorted by motion and extreme angle, of a lone man standing on the hillside above the train. That silhouette, isolated against the sky and near the framework of the bridge, is the stuff of conspiracy theories. In this case, of course, it would be the most mundane theory.
There’s no better place to see the abrupt transition from the semi-“undeveloped” to the densely urban than the edge of Central Park. Trees give way directly to the new generation of “needle buildings,” these spiky skyscrapers that have attracted: (1) big money from Russian kleptocrats and (2) complaints from fans of New York’s traditional architecture. I might be sold on the futuristic spires for their sci-fi appeal.
Departing JFK International Airport over Jamaica Bay, with the Manhattan skyline glittering in the sunrise, brings to mind my favorite topic: the gradient between dense urbanization and “wilderness.” If there’s a consistent theme to my photography, it’s the desire to capture this gradient in a single image (as I sometimes have in other settings.) Even my wide angle lens couldn’t capture the whole scene, but here’s One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building alongside the wetlands of Jamaica Bay, with New Jersey and Brooklyn buffering and smoothing the divide to a gradient.
Decaseconds 