Tag Archives: wall

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Broken Glass, Spray-Painted Wall

March 8, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A shattered glass window and a spray-painted brick wall

This is another small and complex street vignette, found on a wall along a street in Brooklyn, New York while walking around making photographs and looking for a place to eat. This section of wall was covered with a lot of street art, layers of contributions from a large group of people over some period of time, no doubt.

There’s not a whole lot for me to write about this one, except that the juxtaposition of broken glass, a single clean vertical line, and the abstract shapes and colors on the right caught my attention. There appears to be some piece of paper behind the fractured glass, and it looks like it may hold some message, but the meaning remains unclear.

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

Hand to Heart

February 11, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A man on a cell phone outside a coffee shop with holiday decorations

I made this photograph on Christmas Eve day, 2015 in Brooklyn, when we went out to find coffee in the morning. If I recall correctly, we ended up at this Starbucks — though it is possible that we might have just walked past here on the way to another place. The man was probably not the main subject. The wild patterns in the windows were what first caught my attention.

Initially I thought of the photograph as a color image, but the more I looked at it the more the various holiday colors began to distract from the pattern itself, so I decided to go with the monochromatic rendering. Inside there were many people, sitting on chairs and at tables, drinking coffee and checking their laptops. Outside on the cold sidewalk and alone, one man waited for something and checked his phone.

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

Graffiti Covered Wall

February 3, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small portion of a colorful graffiti covered wall, Brooklyn

I used to have a firm policy of virtually never photographing graffiti, and when I couldn’t avoid it I would remove or modify it in post so as to not be part of the sharing that might encourage the sort of graffiti that is really simple vandalism. I still avoid photographing simple “tags” in most cases, especially when they offer little more than the evidence that some anonymous person wrote on a wall. I also have this nagging feeling that photographing graffiti-ridden cityscapes can too easily become a street photography cliché.

However, I’ve become more open to the idea of finding and photographing the accumulative juxtapositions of layers of drawing, painting, posters, and weathering that show up on some urban walls. That’s my way of explaining why I stopped to photograph this Brooklyn wall, moving in close to find compositions among the colors, lines, and shapes that have built up over time and which have been revealed as time has weathered away later layers.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Black and White Photography

January 18, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A Whitney Museum employee photographs a family.

During our December 2015 visit to New York I had my first opportunity to visit the new Whitney Museum in Chelsea, at the south end of the High Line Park. I hadn’t been to the old Whitney, so I was especially interested in the new museum — not only would I see work that I hadn’t looked at before, but I would have a chance to visit a brand new piece of architecture. In fact, I thought the building was fascinating, especially outdoor terraces on each of the floors that I visited. (I started at the top and got through the collections on the 6th, 7th, and 8th floors.) The highest levels thrust out into space, providing dizzying and spectacular New York views, and the visual appearance looking up from the lower terraces is quite something, too.

I like photographing at and around museums. Often the architecture itself is interesting, but even more, the people at museums are fascinating subjects. Perhaps it is just because there are often so many of them packed so tightly together. Maybe it is something about a change in appearance and demeanor among people who are looking at and thinking about art. I spent a lot of time out on those terraces making quick photographs, and when I saw this family lining up against the wall of the museum, asking a museum employee (who was quite cooperative) to take the camera and record their antics, I quickly clicked of a sequence of photographs.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: wall

Broken Glass, Spray-Painted Wall

Hand to Heart

Graffiti Covered Wall

Black and White Photography

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