On a clear day in Manhattan the natural light is downright dynamic. As the sun moves across the sky, the light floods passages through narrow streets lined with tall buildings, and intersects main thoroughfares creating deep valleys of stark contrast in light and shade. When I’m holding a camera, this is the kind of environment that I see in black and white.
For a visit this past October — my first trip back to NYC since October, 2019 — I stayed at a hipster dive boutique hotel in Chelsea, in what’s known as the city’s Flower District, a single block of plant and flower stores on 28th Street between 6th and 7th Aves that service the bulk of the city’s floral and horticultural needs. The sheer amount of flora & foliage that hits the street first thing in the morning is impressive. It turns the sidewalks on either side of the busy one-way, single-lane street into a jungle of plants, trees and flowers that encroach on walking space, fill the environment with lush life, and cast wild shadows that divide visibility into into high contrast zones of light and shade.
The block starts bustling around 5am, several of the stores close mid-day, but many are open until late afternoon, so I managed to take advantage of the light and the action in the street most days, whether I was coming or going. In the morning I’d grab a coffee at a spot around the corner and move up the block east to west; if I was back on the block later in the day, I tried to roll up from the other direction, west to east. In both cases, I kept the sun at my back, giving me some cover and lighting up the subjects in front of me.
This strategy framed most of my travels throughout the city over six days. Whether I was headed to a museum in midtown, meeting some friends in the Village, or on my way to hit up a record store in the LES, whenever I moved through the city, I traveled mostly on foot and tried to roughly map out routes that let me take advantage of where the sun was going to be, in areas where I knew the foot traffic was likely to be busy. I tried to leave enough time to get to where I was going so I could stop and post up in spots where the light was especially good.
And even if it didn’t work out as planned and the sun was squarely overhead flooding the streets with light… New York still the most bustling and interesting city in North America, a target-rich photo environment regardless of the lighting particulars.
This collection of images contains both digital and 35mm film photographs. The digital images, which make up most of the batch, were taken with a Fuji X-Pro3 and an XF27mm f/2.8 lens (equivalent of 40mm on the Fuji’s APSC sensor); the film was shot using a Rollei 35S (also a 40mm f/2.8 lens) with Kodak Tri-X 400 35mm black & white film. A few of these shots are pretty decent, but they’re all passable enough to share publicly. (I might throw some outtakes into the next edition of One For The Road… just sayin’ .) Enjoy…
