Sheet metal fence, roll-up door, trash, and hand-written message to the garbage man, Brooklyn
“Please close and lock this gage. Garbage man”
I know this will baffle a few readers… but there you go. I’m tempted to offer little explanation and let you make of it what you will. This small vignette comes from a semi-industrial area beneath a bridge in a section of Brooklyn, New York. Is that cryptic enough? ;-)
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Memorial pool at the National September 11 Memorial, New York City.
It is hard to know precisely what or how to write about this place as it evokes so many responses of all different sorts. On that September day over a decade ago we were on the opposite coast, watching the events unfold as if in a dream. A year and a half earlier we had stood on top of these buildings at night. Since then my oldest son has moved to New York and now works within a very short distance of this place. Our first visit to the site was a few years ago, when almost all original traces of the September 11 events were gone (though if you looked closely you could see chips and cracks in places), and it had become an incredibly busy construction site, with more cranes than I had ever seen in one place and with the new tower climbing skyward. It was hard to connect what we saw on that visit to what had occurred – until we walked around a corner and saw a memorial to firefighters from the closest fire station.
This time we first walked here on Christmas morning. We didn’t pick that day for any particular reason except that we were not far away and it seemed like a place that we wanted to visit. We walked down, looked up at the new tower through trees, and walked back. The next day we wanted to visit the Memorial, so we returned and stood in the lines with thousands of other people in freezing weather as light snow flurries fell. Once there I knew I wanted to photograph, but I didn’t want to intrude on anyone else, so I photographed things more than people in the flat, cloudy light. This photograph includes a bit of one of the pools, where water that has just fallen down the upper walls, leaving ice behind on this cold day, pauses momentarily before continuing its descent into the center void of the memorial.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
A pedestrian walks past a New York City post office building.
An apology might be appropriate for this photograph, which might be the oddest Christmas Day photograph of 2013. We had arrived in New York City the previous evening, and when we woke up on Christmas morning in Manhattan things were relatively quiet. We had an afternoon engagement in Brooklyn, but plenty of morning time to kill before that, so we figured that we might just take a (rather cold) walk deeper into Lower Manhattan, and we ended up heading toward the World Trade Center site.
Because there were so few people – and so few cars – out this morning, certain photographic opportunities arose that might not usually be easy or even possible here. You can bet that on a more typical day this street would have been filled with vehicles and the sidewalk filled with other pedestrians. But on this quiet day it was much easier to photograph unobstructed views or to find an individual figure in this urban landscape. As this man in black strode purposefully (very purposefully for Christmas day!) past this post office building I saw that I might have a brief opportunity to frame him against the architecture of the building and as soon as I saw this particular shot, a little voice in my head said… “Ding!” (Sorry. But probably not sorry enough.)
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
“Paint on Metal Wall” — Colorful patches of spray paint on a metal wall, Brooklyn, New York
While wandering around in the DUMBO area of Brooklyn, between a walk in one direction on the Brooklyn Bridge and a walk back in the other direction on the Manhattan Bridge, we walked up some streets under the flyover at the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge. This is not what you might think of as a “special” area, being beneath a bridge and containing at least some of the expected forms of urban decay. Surprisingly though there were some interesting things to see here – nice light on this day and some urban/street subjects.
As we walked up one narrow street we passed, as I recall it, some storage yards and similar that were fenced off from the roadway and sidewalks. I think this was part of a section of metal fencing along the sidewalk. I remember looking at this very bizarre pattern of colorful paint and wondering how it got there. There were no signs on the wall at this point, but it looked like someone must have spray-painted some objects in front of the wall, and done so more than once and with a wild variety of colors – blue, hot pink, fluorescent green, several shades of hello, orange, black, and more. This accidental art seems to be the result of the creation of something else that was nowhere to be found.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
