A portal near the convergence of two white walls, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
While walking on an upstairs floor in a central area of the New York Museum of Modern Art, I was in an area with stark white walls and portals to an inner “well” – the edges of the portals were treated in warmer tones of paint.
Since the image is minimalist, I’ll make my description minimalist as well.
Alpenglow lights Mount Conness above Lower Young Lake in the Yosemite National Park back-country.
I was recently going through a large portion of my archive in search of a variety of photographs of Mount Conness, a well-known peak along the northeast edge of Yosemite National Park on the crest of the Sierra. This is perhaps not the best known peak in Yosemite for most people – they are obviously going to be far more familiar with the cliffs and domes around Yosemite Valley or with Mount Lyell (the tallest peak in the park) or perhaps Mount Dana (second highest peak, and towering above the Tioga Pass entrance.) Mount Conness is found a bit further “north” along the crest, and while it may be less known, it is certainly no less visible once you know where to look. You can see it in the distance towering above Tenaya Lake if you stop at the iconic Olmsted Point overlook. It is visible from many places along the road to Tuolumne Meadows. Once you get away from roads and into the high country it can be seen from almost any high point with an open view in the direction of the peak, including places like Vogelsang High Sierra Camp.
This photograph was made on a quiet late-season evening at Lower Young Lake, a place that I return to frequently, most of the time in the off-season when fewer people are there and the fall colors of the high country are starting to appear. The peak (and many other features in this area) are beautifully illuminated late in the day as this high ridge is open without obstruction to the west. The light on the peak was magical on this evening, being colorful and contrasting with the higher and more drab clouds, but not being as gaudily bright as it can be on other evenings.
Black and white photograph of the courtyard of the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, photographed through windows of the museum.
Sticking with the urban New York theme for at least one more day, this is another photograph shot from a window in the Museum of Modern Art and looking out over a courtyard and architecturally busy urban scene combining older brick and stone facade buildings with more modern and taller buildings.
There are subtle (or perhaps not so subtle?) reflections in the window through which I made the photograph. These reflections are one reason, though not the only one, that I decided to render this as a black and white image – some of the shadows had colorations that did not work for me. To my mind, this photograph is related to some others that I’ve made featuring views of and through the windows of modern buildings, including this photograph from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
A scene consisting almost entirely of windows and secondary reflected subjects, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Look closely and you’ll perhaps see that this is not quite what it might first appear to be. It is something of a visual trick or joke on one level. It is some other things, too.
The bottom line is that almost nothing in this scene is actually where it appears to be or even what it appears to be. The shot was made through an upstairs window of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the vertical shapes are the window frame and a bit of the interior wall at the far right, with some diagonal elements of the frame at top and bottom. But the “scene” outside is entirely reflected in the windows of the adjacent building – this is actually a photograph of a single glass-walled building, not exactly a photograph of an urban scene with buildings and trees and sidewalks and people – those are all reflections in the glass of the building. Obviously, I was also having some fun with perspective lines going off in a range of different directions – the window frame lines converging to the right, the outside perspective lines converging toward the left, and the converging lines on the reflected buildings headed back to the right. There’s more, but I’ll probably get lost if I try to describe it. A close inspection – easier with the print than in this little jpg – reveals some other odd stuff here and there: double images of some of the reflected buildings, some warping and bending of those shapes, people scattered around the courtyard and some moving figures that are barely visible.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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