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.

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.

As unlikely as it sounds, half the reason I started blogging was so that I could put up images like these. And others of my friends. Most advice on successful blogging says that you should pick a specific topic and cover it keenly. But what if your topic is only the textures of the city, your camerawork sporadic, your pen unsteady? Well, two years out I can say that not much has changed since my very first post. I am a better writer now. And a more confident photographer. On late nights I would still rather spend my taxi money on food, my weed money on beer, and some of my sleeping time inspecting the many colors of drab that the city has to offer.

These colors are part of my New York — just as much as the shining personalities that illuminate it.