Venturing Into Brooklyn

This is another in my series of urban landscapes. It was taken in Brooklyn on a cloudy afternoon. I haven't done too much in Brooklyn, but am eager to do more.

The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn was just named a Super Fund cleanup site. I took photographs of the Gowanus at night on a trip with the Municipal Art Society. You can see some of these photos on the Municipal Art Society's website at

http://mas.org/mas-patrons-get-up-close-and-personal-with-the-gowanus-canal/

Series of Urban Landscapes - Queens

I'm working on a series of photographs that show the bleak poetry of the urban landscape. As the population of the city expands (8.3 million and growing!) and Manhattan becomes too full, real estate developers have trained their sights on Brooklyn and Queens. These areas traditionally were low-density and partly industrial, but are now home to many sleek glass high rise apartment buildings. I remember going out to photograph along the waterfront in Long Island City a few years back. The first time I went, there was a series of muddy lots. A few months later, there was a series of high rise apartment buildings. I was totally shocked. And I realized that many of the deserted areas I love are going to change. So I set out to capture them as they are now.

I approach them not in a strictly documentary fashion, but more in a poetic vein: how they feel at a certain time of day, how they look in certain weather conditions (I love snow!), how their loneliness and desuetude affect me.

In the Beginning...

In the beginning, I didn't like taking pictures in New York City. Maybe it was too familiar. It certainly was too crowded, dirty, threatening, and everything seemed to have been photographed a gazillion times. But in 2001 the day my mother died, my father had a heart attack. He recovered and went on to have a very peaceful and content old age (he lived to 93), but I had to give up my own apartment and move back in with him to take care of him.

Since he needed constant care, I was very tied down. I couldn't take trips, I couldn't just go off. I had the afternoon when his aide came to do whatever I needed to do. So I started to take some pictures near the river (I live in Peter Cooper--oh, yes!). I would see Queens not too far away, and one day hired a car to go over and explore a bit. I soon realized it wasn't the Wild West, and that the 7 Train was a good deal cheaper. So I came to love the waterfront and areas where the industrial past pokes through.