Color My Missives

This and some others come from an early morning shoot last week at the Brooklyn piers.

For every part of me that lives and dies with line, shape, and form — the part that obsesses first over the composition of the frame, then its re-composition (if necessary) in photoshop and color correction — there is the soft voice that grumbles that there is no person to look at, no story. This irreconcilable cleft between formal image-making and narrative is where I have planted myself squarely for reasons not altogether clear. For that, the zen of capturing an image like this is partly therapeutic, partly maddening.

A man came up to me that morning. He, like the group of men he was in, was dressed in a blue zip-up worksuit and headed into an adjacent garage area. Apart from the others, he carried a dustpan — the kind that hangs and swings from a broomstick.

“Put it here,” he said. I did not understand. His accent was heavy, Mexican probably. His skin was a caramel brown and oiled, textured and not without a history. The other men in the group were black mostly and spoke in the gravelly voices of the morning. In the second that I reassessed the man apart from his coworkers, the arroyos of his accent were just beginning to flatten themselves into english I understood. I realized that I was holding a banana peel.

“Put it here, ” he repeated. This time he pointed to the dustpan. I dropped the peel in it and thanked him. My next thought was that his skin glowed in the morning light, that it would look good in a photograph.

I could hear the sound of gravel under the boots of men as they assembled on the other side of the gate.

Intentional cultural poaching or no, ODB Liquors on Mission Hill in Boston might be the most keenly named individual business I’ve come across. I can think of no better tribute to the man and his work.
 

 
The name has to be intentional, right?
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[1] I’ve just spent the past half-hour recapping ODB’s career on youtube. If NSFW street language isn’t a problem, you might want to check out the linked Pryor-esque clip of Ol’ Dirty monologizing onstage. Among many Barron’s-level gems, we hear the nearly-quotable aphorism, “Before drugs was illegal, b----, it was LEGAL!”
[2] Hip-hop’s cultural fluidity as spoiler of youth reigns as ever (vocal lines on the song sampled from ODB). Stunner shades for all.

ed note: also posted over at desedo.

When people who are from New York casually claim to have seen it all, it is something they are mostly right about. For those of us non-natives who live here, there is no casualness to the claim; the most bizarre things are simply part of the mix, but we notice them.

Images for the former marine Jeremiah Wright, Sean Bell and anyone else who’s been counted on the outside.

It is uncertain, when staring at a caving ceiling, where beautiful leaves off and dangerous begins. Even when the odd bit of plaster chips off and falls. The question sat atop the room with all the flourish of a feather in a cap. The evening’s meeting brimmed with the work of contemplation.

Entering the house, my host asked me to make sure I ascended only the far left part of the staircase as some work was being done there too. But who could complain, really? The place had style. Later, the assembled group joked with uncertain smiles about remembering to stay right on the way back down the unlit staircase. The host’s warm embrace, however, sent the guests back into the city steadied. Somewhere above, minutes were being typed; the form of things were becoming more solid.