Tag Archives: people

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Museum Windows, Shadows

February 26, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Silhouetted figures, windows, and beams of light, Metropolitan Museum

This is a second “take” on a location I photographed between Christmas and New Year’s Day last year, when we spent a week in New York. It was an exceptionally cold week, and on a few days we decided that we really needed to find indoor activities. (On other days we defied the cold and wind and walked all over Manhattan anyway.) One of the reliable options is a visit to a museum, so we headed to the Metropolitan, where we wanted to see the David Hockney show. You can’t see it in this photograph, but the museum was packed with other visitors who were also looking for a warm, indoor option.

We passed through this room twice, on our way to and from a section of the museum with relatively modern art that we wanted to view. This space is really essentially a very wide walkway, though I suspect that it could also be used for exhibits at times. The row of tall windows along the southern wall opened to Central Park and, further away, the Manhattan skyline. Lots of people took advantage of the wide window sills as a place to sit. The resulting effects of light were intriguing — backlit people in a variety of poses, the faint image of the park and city outside, and the alternative effects of shadows and reflections from the bright light streaming through the windows.

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

People At The Corner

February 18, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

People stand on a Manhattan corner, waiting for the light to change

I work in various ways when photographing in urban settings. Sometimes I’m somewhat slow and careful, perhaps waiting for people to populate a scene or when treating the urban environment as a sort of landscape. Other times I work more quickly and spontaneously, photographing quickly and intuitively as instants occur and quickly are gone. This photograph came from the latter approach, and my recollection is that I made a series of perhaps three photographs in quick succession, perhaps not even looking through the viewfinder.

There are, obviously, people in the photograph. But something else here links to something I was told by someone who lives and works there. In Manhattan you constantly see these scaffolds set up over sidewalks. I had assumed that it was simply the case that there is work going on all the time. My source tells me it isn’t always quite that simple — sometimes the scaffolding is left up well beyond when is needed… because it is cheaper to leave it there than to take it down and find a place to store it! I enjoy looking a bit more closely at the individuals in this photograph and not just at the group as a whole. The people have a variety of demeanors and poses, some are interacting with others, and they vary in the extent to which they are engaged in the scene verses walking through it without paying much attention.

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

Winter Light and Cross Walks

February 17, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter backlight illuminates pedestrians and cross walks in Manhattan

People in cross walks seems to be becoming a bit of a theme here. I think that a reason may be that people tend to stay more or less in one place a bit longer while waiting to cross and their paths are more constrained while crossing the street. On top of that, encountering the temporary end of the sidewalk at a street corner does tend to face people into groups, and once the light changes they retain some connection to the group for a moment.

A few other factors appealed to me in this scene, and it wasn’t just the people. The light was wonderful, low winter light coming up the street from Lower Manhattan, and impossible to keep its sources out of the camera’s field of view in this shot. That produced the soft glare of light in front of the buildings on the right and it backlit the figures and case long shadows. Those shadows cross perpendicular to the light-colored lines of the cross walk, with become wider as they get closer to my camera position.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco

Museum Lobby

January 30, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Visitors milling about in the lobby of SFMOMA

It has been a while, and I was more than due for one of my periodic walking days in San Francisco. As per the usual plan, I was out the front door of our house long before dawn, to the train station by bus, and then by train to San Francisco, arriving just before sunrise. There were clouds over the City to my north and west, so I headed to the edge of the Bay, where the skies were clear to the east and early sun shone through on the shoreline and the City. I photographed along the waterfront for a while, and eventually wanted past the Ferry Building and up into the City north of Market Street.

I had a plan to circle back to SFMoMA by late morning, since the expansive Walker Evans show ends there in about a week. I arrived and took a break from my own photograph to view his and that of his contemporaries. (To anyone in the SF Bay Area who likes this sort of thing, go now! There is a ton of work in this show, and it ends a few days into February.) Evans evokes a mixed response for me. I share an interest in some of the subjects that interested him, including certain kinds of shops and other urban structures. His photographs of common tools are exquisite, and the WPA photographs of sharecroppers are really great. Other work impresses me less, and some of the photographs of objects and buildings (though not all of the latter!) impress me at times as being snapshots. But still, there’s a lot of great work in the show, and Evans had a big influence on the ways that many of us see. Once I completed my time in the Evans exhibit, it was time to leave and head back to the train station. But before I left I made a few photographs inside the museum, where I saw for the first time the patters of these lights reflecting on the floor in many places.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: people

Museum Windows, Shadows

People At The Corner

Winter Light and Cross Walks

Museum Lobby

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