Tag Archives: grafitti

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Green and Blue Wall

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Green and Blue Wall
Grafitti and poster remnants on a green and blue Brooklyn brick wall.

Green and Blue Wall. New York City. December 21, 2015.© Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Graffiti and poster remnants on a green and blue Brooklyn brick wall.

We arrived in New York late the day before, in time to check in to lodgings and meet our “kids” (two sons and their fiances) for dinner, but there wasn’t a lot of time to get around and see and photograph. The next morning we met up with our youngest son in the more or less the Williamsburg area, and we wandered about, hitting the waterfront of the East River and then finding lunch.

During any bit of urban wandering I’m almost always on the lookout for photographs. Photographing on the street is an exercise in working quickly and being versatile. In most cases I don’t have a specific subject in mind — the closest to that may be a general idea of looking a buildings or people or water or interiors or… In this case I was in an area with a lot of older construction, and we passed through a few spots that were obviously the hope to lots of posters and graffiti. Oddly, since people are sometimes trying to paint out the tagging, there can be many layers of often new paint, posters in various states of decay, and odds and ends of painted words and images. Here the remnants of a poster partially obscured a hand drawn heart on a wall that appeared to have been painted in two not quite identical shades of blue-green.

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” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Security Shutters

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Security Shutters
Partially closed security shutters in front of a San Francisco business

© Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Partially closed security shutters in front of a San Francisco business

There are many things I enjoy about doing street photograph, and several of them have to do with the fast-moving and spontaneous nature of the pursuit. The urban environment, at least once you start seeing its possibilities, can be an almost overwhelmingly rich source of potential subjects, to that point that I often have to make a subconscious choice to deal with only a subset of them at any given moment. For a while I may focus on color, then I may engage with human subjects, then it might be effects of light, or balances of shapes and mass, or tiny details, or…

As we turned down this block between Stockton and Grant during an evening of night street photography in San Francisco, for some reason I made one of these gear changes. Moments before I had been photographing people and the fronts of shops that were closing up for the day — but as I walked down this street I forgot about all of that and instead photographed mostly small details such as the accordion pattern of this security panel over a window.

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” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Walking Man With Child

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Walking Man With Child
Walking Man With Child

Walking Man With Child. New York City. August 5, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A man carrying a child walks along a Manhattan street

Beyond the most general location — “Manhattan” — I’m not certain at the moment where I made this photograph, though there is a good chance that it was in Manhattan between roughly NYU and Grand Central Station. It seems, to me, to be emblematic of New York City in many ways, and the incongruity of an individual man carrying a child while walking through the area caught my attention. To be honest, the two of them were a lucky stroke. I”m pretty certain that I had first noticed that scene and thought to photograph it as a sort of urban landscape, but that as I was framing my shots the man and child happened to walk into the scene.

In retrospect, there now seems to me to be something almost poignant in the image of the man cradling the small child in his arms as he walks past and through what appears to be a very run down urban landscape. (The truth is probably a bit less dramatic, as you can find bits and pieces of real estate that look like this in many parts of the city, from what I’ve seen.) I think that it also helps that we is caught in a bit of soft but directed light reflected into the scene from surrounding buildings. I find the details of the graffiti and related stuff on the walls to be interesting, too. Of course, to the extent that I “saw” these things at the time, it had to be largely an instinctive matter, since there is rarely enough time to carefully consider all of these things when on the street and when the subject is walking into and out of the frame!

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.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Graffiti on the Roof

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Graffiti on the Roof
Graffiti on the Roof

Graffiti on the Roof. New York City. December 27, 2013. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Grafitti on urban roofs beyond cyclone fence near the Manhattan Bridge, New York City

This is another photograph from our “hiking day” in New York City during our December 2013 visit. It wasn’t quite our plan when the day started, but we ended up walking from our Canal Street Hotel down to the Brooklyn Bridge and across, then around the DUMBO area of Brooklyn, and back across the Manhattan Bridge to the city again. The two bridges are a study in contrasts. Brooklyn Bridge is, of course, a huge tourist destination and walking across it is almost a requirement for New York visitors and others. Even on this very cold – sub freezing – winter day there were thousands of people crossing. The Manhattan Bridge, on the other hand, is a rather lonely place for pedestrians. we had been warned that it is tremendously noisy, since above ground transit trains cross it only feet from the narrow pedestrian walkway.

Probably because it has not been spiffed up to be a tourist attraction, the Manhattan Bridge also has a lot more aesthetic rough edges. The bridge structure seems mostly to be utilitarian steel, trains run constantly and not far from the walkway, and especially at the Manhattan end the bridge passes above some neighborhoods that don’t appear to be exactly upper class. Looking down from the bridge I saw some of the most extensive graffiti I have seen… on the roofs of buildings, where it is only visible from the bridge and not at all from the streets below. Most of the time I make it a rule to not photograph graffiti, but here it was so extensive and so established that it seemed worth it to make a few photographs through the cyclone fence protecting the bridge walkway.

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

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.