Down a rabbit hole, again…
It has been a rough couple of days. My back has been bothering me for the last couple of days. Before I left home to come here, I developed some sciatica, something I'm all too familiar with — five lower lumbar surgeries will do that to you. For the first few days I was here in NYC, I was taking a prescribed course of prednisone, but in addition to the prescription, it was recommended that I stop, or at least cut back on my exercise and stretching to prevent any further irritation of the sciatic nerve. The prednisone and discontinuing my exercise and stretching routine worked wonders for my sciatic nerve, but the muscles and connective tissue in my lower back are not happy — I suspect it is the lack of stretching and the pounding of walking on pavement for hours. By mid-day or early afternoon, my back is ready for some rest. I have had to cut short my plans. I am a little discouraged and disappointed. I am going to attempt to stop whining at this point and carry on.
This is my favorite image from this visit to New York so far. I made it on Monday morning while wandering around Chinatown. I liked the image so much that my plan this morning was to go and photograph it with my digital camera, analog camera and iPhone. I walked around Chinatown for almost an hour and a half and never found this location. I knew when I made this image that it would be a good one. I should have taken an image with my iPhone right then, which would have recorded the location — lesson learned.
I spent the day shooting with my iPhone. Before heading out, I had an email exchange with another photographer about using your iPhone to make images, and I just decided to put away the “real” camera and shoot with my iPhone. Shooting with an iPhone is more spontaneous and, in some way, liberating. There is no pressure to make good images, whatever that means. You just point and make images of whatever you find interesting.
Despite changing equipment, my mind’s eye was still seeing and focusing on the colors and juxtapositions of the graffiti, posters and stickers pasted on seemingly every surface in some areas. There are some neighborhoods where it seems like the walls are covered with graffiti, posters and stickers, and other neighborhoods are relatively free of this type of expression — I could see no obvious reason for the difference. We are only speaking of one or two streets apart — it’s a mystery.
Today, I found myself focusing more on color and patterns, and less on the chaos of the layers of stickers. I am not sure why. I do not remember thinking about that difference at all. It was later when I was walking through the galleries at MoMA, and yes, I went back again — more on that later, that I realized something. As I looked around the galleries, I began to see the same sort of colors and shapes I had been seeing all morning. That revelation was confirmed as I looked through today’s images after getting back to the apartment — sort of interesting.
Anyway, you may remember this image from the apartment a few days ago. That is a rather small book published for members of the Museum of Modern Art to celebrate an exhibition of plates from Henri Matisse's portfolio Jazz in the summer of 1960. MoMA had received, as a gift from the artist, one of the 100 copies without text of Matisse's portfolio "Jazz" — an amazing work of his “cut-outs.” Of the twenty plates in the original portfolio, sixteen were selected, with certain pages from Matisse's accompanying text included in this small book.
The book sent me down a rabbit hole, but one I am very glad I visited. His cut-out work is amazing, and something I had no knowledge of before seeing that rather small book. I will let MoMA give you an idea of the work. During the last decade of his life, Henri Matisse deployed two simple materials—white paper and gouache—to create works of wide-ranging color and complexity. An unorthodox implement, a pair of scissors, was the tool Matisse used to transform paint and paper into a world of plants, animals, figures, and shapes. If you would like to see examples of the work and learn more about how he made them, I would recommend this site: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/matisse/the-cut-outs.html
So, this afternoon, when my back started to complain, I went back to MoMA, hoping to see some Matisse cut-outs. Alas, there were none on exhibition. Hopefully, the Jazz plates will be part of an exhibition in the future. Oh, I found a copy of that rather small book on AbeBooks.com and purchased it for less than $50. It was described as being in very good condition — we will see, there were copies listed on eBay and other sites for as much as $950!
Included in the gallery below is a photograph of a stairwell in St. Paul's Chapel on the Columbia University campus. I attended a concert there with my friend. The concert was part of a celebration of 200 years of Italian Studies at Columbia. The selection included pieces by Italian composers and composers who were influenced by and fond of the Italian musical style — among those composers listed in the program was a Giovanni Sebastiano Bach — wink, hope you get the joke. My friend and I both found it very amusing.
Additionally, among the photographs you will find images that are small vignetts of paintings at MoMA. My apologies to the artists — Gorky, Kupka, Klimpt, Picasso, Anderson, and Bradford. As, I wrote above I found it interesting to see similar shapes and colors in thier work and what I was shooting. See if you can pick them out.
There is not much else to do but get back out on the streets again. I wonder what my mind’s eye will pick out next.
