Tag Archives: city

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: People, Photographs: Photographers, Photographs: Urban/Street

Photographer Louis Mendes

January 20, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The timing of our December 2015 visit to New York City coincided with a special event on the New York Subway system — a day when historic subway trains run along one Manhattan route. Our sons had told us about this before, and we all met up at the south end of the line to catch the first train. It is made up of a variety of cars — some from just before the vintage of the current trains and others from much further in the past. It is a big event, and by the time the second run began there were big crowds. (One fun thing was watching the looks of the faces of folks at stations who didn’t know about this… as ancient subway trains rolled in and stopped to take on passengers.)

As I walked through one of the cars there was a big group of photographers, many holding vintage film cameras, some rigged up to work with modern electronic flash units. This fellow immediately caught my eye, and for a bunch of reasons. Many years ago my father had a camera almost exactly like his, and I thought it was the coolest thing back then. I also was taken by the contrast between his rig, with his giant camera and multiple flash units, and what I use to photograph in circumstance these days… a very small mirrorless system that works so well in low light than I never use flash. And I was pretty sure I recognized him, and thought that I had read about him somewhere. It was too crowded and noisy to talk, but I later figured out that he is street photographer Louis Mendes, who is well-known for photographing with this eclectic equipment in Manhattan. (I later ran into him again in front of the B&H store, and I recently read an interview in which he said that is his “third favorite” location for photographing.)

There is an article in The New Yorker about Mendex” New York City’s Most Classic Street Photographer. (2016)

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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. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Food Sing

January 16, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Food Sing Chinese food take out and eat in, Brooklyn

On our first full day in New York this past December we took the subway to this area of Brooklyn to meet up with one of our sons (and later his fiancé and eventually our other son and his fiancé) and wandered around the area a bit, ending up on the waterfront of the East River in an area that seems to be developing rapidly. (This Californian, being from the San Francisco Bay Area, certainly recognized the familiar signs of rapid expansion and wild real estate price inflation…)

Later we walked back up and away from the water looking for food — by the local clock is was lunch time, but by our jet-lagged internal clocks it seemed like a good opportunity for breakfast. As we walked I, of course, had my little street photography camera out and I photographed this and that subject as we moved along. This corner restaurant intrigued me for a bunch or reasons. Certainly the name, which no doubt has meaning that I can’t quite parse, is suggestive with its references to the practical (food) and the aesthetic (sing). But the colors and shapes of the building also intrigue me — the contrast between the hot yellow and red of the awning, the cool tones of blue, and the bits of drab urban street scene, photographed at a moment that was almost free of people.

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Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Woman Photographing Brick Wall

January 13, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A woman stands on a bench to photograph a brick wall along the High Line Park, New York.

I made this photograph on a winter’s day walk along the High Line Park in western Manhattan — the increasingly well-known park that extends along the abandoned path of an old elevated railroad bed. The park is very popular, and even on a winter day there were many, many people out walking along it, and the surrounding neighborhoods were also filled. Of course, there is a lot going on in this Chelsea neighborhood — the Whitney Museum is now open at the southern end of the park, there are lots of restaurants and more along its length, and the north end now terminates at the busy construction site of the Hudson Yards.

When I made the photograph I probably wasn’t thinking consciously about much or than the possibility of isolating the figure of the woman, engrossed in making a close up photograph the bricks, against the small and large patterns of the background wall, with the slight natural intrusion of the tree at the right edge. Later I thought about what she was photographing, and how most people might simply wonder what the heck she sees there, in a place where there is nothing apparent to photograph. This might be a bit of a metaphor for lots of photography, where the act of capturing “something you see” defines your world and presents a personal vision of it to others. And I still do like the complex set of interlocking patterns of the wall, the wooden structure, the window, and the single figure.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Manhattan Sidewalk Scene

January 7, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Pedestrians on a Manhattan sidewalk on a cloudy winter morning.

This is one of those street photographs that I probably can’t fully explain to viewers. I’ll try, but it simply may or may not work for you — and it certainly is, at least superficially, not much like my landscape photography. Or is it? When I’m out and about in an urban area, sometimes I start to look beyond the general hubbub of the scene and I began to spot elements that I find fascinating: a particular person, a relationship of colors, light in unexpected places, juxtapositions of people doing things that may be related or unrelated, and transitory moments that are gone as quickly as they appear.

When I’m in this mode of seeing I often stop and watch the scene, waiting for something to happen. I don’t know in advance quite what it will be, but I know that the potential is there. (This, in fact, is one similarity to photographing the natural world, where more things than you might imagine are the result of simply being there at the right time and watching.) Here something about the front of this building caught my attention, and there was a steady stream of people passing by. (Of course there was — this is Manhattan!) At the moment of this exposure a bunch of things happened — somehow there are two strollers in the scene. Several people are engrossed by their smartphones. The woman at the far right is in a surprising and somewhat contorted position, and everything seems to have stopped in some sort of tableau.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: city

Photographer Louis Mendes

Food Sing

Woman Photographing Brick Wall

Manhattan Sidewalk Scene

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.