Ask any two travelers about their experience in the same
city and you will hear about two different cities. They will
tell you about a meal they had, a museum they visited, the
shops they found, the entertainment, the traffic, the noise,
the sex, the dirt, the style, or the misery of the people.
Some of these consumables attract my attention too, but something
else, tangible yet somewhat ineffable, draws my deeper curiosity.
How does a city achieve its particular impression? Why does
it resonate in me the way that it does? Why do I have a certain
feeling on a street in Paris and another in Los Angeles?
I admit to loving cities. There is a wildness to them, a
sense of the unknown. In that way they are like nature. The
invisible meaning of cities lies, for me, in the substance
of the city itself. The space speaks to me first, in concert
with the materials that create it; stainless steel and glass,
marble and granite, brick and shingle, concrete and glittering
asphalt, fountains, boulevards, parks, towers, monuments,
all describing or filling a space, all bristling with energy.
Walking through this field of energy I suddenly come upon
a square, a crossroads, an empty lot; by what magic it has
hold of me I do not know. Call it visceral or spiritual,
I know something is there - the way a Native American or
Australian Aborigine knows a charmed or holy site in the
landscape. In a city - a totally man-made place - it is most
likely through proportion, mass, emptiness, materials, or
light that we get a message. Who knows over what ancient
hallowed ground the current city resides? All I know is if
I "feel" something I stop. It is not my eyes that first take
in the sensory field in front of me, but some intuition more
primitive. When it arises I've learned to go lightly and
let it hold me. It is here, in the brief moment of navigating
this subtle resistance, that photographic sensibility comes
to life. Stay a moment, come awake to the call - see what
is out there, apparent and invisible - and you may make an
original, personal recognition - a photograph, a description
of your own awake-ness. If you choose not to stay then the
moment flows into the next moment and the next and you move
on.
Cities often gain the sense of physical power and presence
in relation to their orientation to the light. New York is
a brilliant example of the right orientation. Although it
is a northern city its solar arrangement is pitched as perfectly
as a sundial. New York is tough, flinty, glinting. The rock
it sits on is schist: a glittery, mica-flecked stone that
dazzles the eye. New York has picked up its character from
its bedrock; everything here shines, from the roadway to
the skyscraper tops. The seasonal light serves this city
well; sultry and suffused in summer, almost tropical, beveled
and bright in fall, brittle and all edges in winter. In fact
it is easy to forget that Manhattan is an island and New
York a seacoast city with the sea's particular light. Its
avenues run north and south, a photographers dream. Walk
on the sunny side of Fifth Avenue heading north and you have
the light at your back, while everyone coming toward you
is both brilliantly illuminated and partially blinded, giving
you the advantage of being able to photograph in broad daylight
yet remain somewhat invisible. A particular breed of photographer
loves the theater of the city streets. Think of the scale
of this stage where human beings are seen against a backdrop
of sixty story sky-scrapers! Nowhere is the human comedy
more boldly visible than on the streets of New York City.
Movement is ceaseless, but not without grace. One's gestures
and timing in the street, the subway, the elevator have to
be as precise as a matador's, as agile as a dancer's and
as swift as an athlete's. One can glimpse these brief performances
a hundred breathtaking times a day if only you lift your
eyes to what is around you. Cities demand acute attention
in order to be fully enjoyed - of course we say that about
life too.
Given the city's density it is amazing that one can stand
at the corner of Fifty Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue and
see all the way down to lower Manhattan. A shaft of light
like the flight of an arrow cleaves through the concrete
and glass leaving you with the sense that you can possess
all that you see. The cross-streets, running east and west,
draw into the heart of the city the cool rich blend of two
rivers and the scent of roasting coffee from the Jersey shore.
In early morning or on a summer's evening golden beams skitter
off every surface like lasers, burnishing fire-escapes, pediments,
manhole covers, the very bricks in a molten crescendo of
fiery light.
St. Petersburg, also, is a city which combines the phenomena
of light and location. I have not experienced its long winter
night, but I have walked through the exalted White Nights
of summer. St. Petersburg is modern in the sense of the city
as a concept. A Czar, indulging his fantasy with a force
greater than the Pharaohs, hurled an entire Seventeenth Century
Italian city into a swamp in the Bay of Finland. There it
sits, a Southern European city on the brow of Mother Russia,
complete with palaces, parks, boulevards, bridges, canals,
churches and fortress, all dressed in Tuscan colors, rose
and violet, siena and olive, crimson and gold. There is something
wonderfully unreal about it. It is a haunting city. Perhaps
it is the magnitude of the vision and effort which gives
it this haunting quality. This mystery is aided and intensified
by the endurance of the light, which is at once uplifting
and elegiac. Sunset goes on for hours, spreading longer and
longer beams through groves of trees in the parks, across
the vast parade grounds, down gritty side streets worn out
from the hardship and lean years of socialism. A crust of
grime covers the buildings where colors have been muddied
by time and neglect. The street proportions here are like
nowhere else. The city blocks are relentlessly long and the
buildings brutally repetitive, unrelieved by flower-boxes
or awnings. Sunlight on their facades is like rouge on the
cheeks of an old woman. Perhaps that is part of the haunting
quality: the cruelty of artifice on the face of the real.
The light traces its way over cornice and dome, edges balustrade
and battlements, ranges along the unbroken embankment girding
the Neva, bringing hope and warmth. Along this light-gilded
wall I saw more lovers than I ever saw in Paris. The sun
drew them out of their dingy housing and rallied them along
the Water's Edge where briefly, like moths, they played in
the light.
We have all experienced cities that feel exhausted or that
make us feel that way. Cities whose relation to the light
leaves them dark and gloomy. In time people stop walking
there. They begin to drive to and from the old center. As
businesses fail and the city comes apart, parking garages
and empty lots punctuate and deteriorate the city wall. These
new spaces, like accidental piazzi, open the city up to radical,
new perspectives. If you are a walker in these cities you
may benefit from their malaise in surprising ways. Like a
cartographer you may map the city to your own design, seeing
through it, as if the plan of the city, its logic, was seen
in a new way precisely because of this current failure which,
oddly, gives it a fresh dramatic presence. Unexpected pools
of shadow lie next to blazing sunlight. Nature reappears
in wild variety in the midst of the financial district. Old
walls from the last century border a sleek new building clad
in pink granite with bronzed windows girded by black anodized
mullions: a modern architectural version of the time-worn
image of the old crone and the whore, right there on the
street.
The space in the city begins to take on a resounding, surreal
quality like the spaces in the paintings of Edward Hopper
and DiChirico. I found St. Louis exciting because of this
modern dilemma; one that challenges many older, mid-size
cities in America. The more time I spent in St. Louis the
more aware I became of the emptiness of the streets, the
eerie quiet and solemnity, even in midday. Minor events took
on seemingly great significance. Two figures stopped in conversation
on an empty street, seem as eternal as statuary. Down by
the river whole trees were thrown on the bank, like a boneyard
of leavings from forests far to the north. Architectural
elements, innocent and functional suddenly seemed to bear
down upon the street with sepulchral weight. Perhaps it is
the luxury of being a stranger in a city that arouses this
attribution of mysterious qualities to ordinary things. I'd
like to think that these free-form connections come up out
of some reservoir of knowledge we carry in us more realized
than we suspect, which is dampened by our habitual responses
to our familiar surroundings and then set free when we travel.
Every city has a celebrated monument that sets it apart;
a tower or cathedral, a square or park. St. Louis has the
Arch. I found it deeply moving, profound. There were days
when, standing beneath the Arch, I felt I knew the power
of the pyramids. It was restorative, contemplative. It was
more than a technological marvel or a symbol. It was pure
form, the beauty of mathematics, a drawing on the heavens,
perfect pitch. It was constant and it was never the same.
Light and color made their way over its surface. I have seen
the Arch change from a white you could not look at to black
in broad daylight. I have seen it disappear, reflect like
a mirror, and turn pink, sometimes all in one day. I remember
mountains doing that. Standing beside it, one sees human
scale diminish as when a figure stands at the ocean's edge.
It contains the space that cathedrals aspire to. You feel
it most when you submit to it.
The experience is similar with another monument, perhaps
the greatest icon of the Twentieth Century, the Empire State
Building. With it was born the term Sky-Scraper. The word
itself has the charm of a Native American chant. This building
is to New York as Mt. Fuji is to Japan. Formal, mythic, constant,
yet ever-changing. The Empire State Building is the pylon
around which I turned during this particular photographic
inquiry. From river to river, from Harlem to the Battery,
I looked at the connection between ordinary life down on
the streets and Sky-Scraper. I wanted to see if, as in Hokusai's
prints of Mt. Fuji, there might be a connection between the
humble daily lives of the inhabitants and this majestic form.
Ask a question and you have to be prepared for any answers
that arise. The Fuji question is really asking, in photographic
terms, what happens when you use a nominal subject, such
as the Empire State Building or the Arch, as a lever to lift
a hidden, larger subject onto the plane of visibility? Is
there a state where revelations about both are achieved,
and coming together, they produce a "third voice," a fresh
new view of the whole? This is what challenged me in Atlanta.
I was invited to photograph a new skyscraper and its relation
to the city. Since Atlanta sits on essentially flat or gently
rolling terrain this structure was visible everywhere. I
chose a circling movement as my operating principle. I started
photographing at the base of the building and went out in
continuously wider circles, for over a year, until I was
as far away as thirty miles. What I saw was more than a mere
building and its surroundings. I witnessed the eternal contest
between man the builder and nature the reclaimer. Nature
is fierce in the American South. This fecund, hot, brooding
region produces vegetation at such a rate that if you turn
your back on it swallows sidewalks, powerlines, shopping
plazas in record time. Everywhere I looked, within the sight-line
of the building, I saw old neighborhoods and woodlands threatened
by the developers. Nature was taking a beating for yet another
corporate tower, another set of identical, faceless houses,
another shopping mall with the same stores as the last one
just a few minutes down the road. The aim seemed to be to
denude the land of anything that grew, pave it over with
concrete, put a few scrawny saplings back here or there,
in a pot or decorative island of green, anything to control
the environment. Wherever I went, old trees lay battered
and toppled as if by Herculean force. It was unbearably sad
to me. I saw unreasoned, insatiable greed in the form of
spent trees. I sensed no one was learning anything from this.
That it was all acceptable in the name of progress. We have
all seen and heard this before. This conflict is not new,
but it hurt more deeply this time. In Atlanta I was an active
witness and I could not turn my back on what I saw.
I began to look at that building as if it were a bomb, the
cause of silent devastation. It seemed to me to be like a
pebble thrown in a pond, whose ripples go out in all directions,
roiling the equilibrium of the surface. So too here, the
shock waves rolled over communities, industry, open green
land, the invisible fabric of human desire and it does it
again and again and again.
