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This was taken at the corner of Perry and the West Side Highway
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This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
Oh, one last thing: I've created a customized Google Map to show the precise details of each day's photo-walk. I'll be updating it each day, and the most recent part of my every-block journey will be marked in red, to differentiate it from all of the older segments of the journey, which will be shown in blue. You can see the map, and peek at it each day to see where I've been, by clicking on this link
URL link to Ed's every-block progress through Manhattan
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
I took the plunge and decided to start the Summer Sampler Series Quilt along. After 3 days here is my progress.
blogged at purplepandaquilts.blogspot.com/2011/07/summer-sampler-qui...
4x5 quilt bee.
Based on a quilt made by the amazing Rita of Redpepperquilts, blog post is here. I think she's coming out with a pattern early next year. I reverse engineered it knowing the block was 12" finished (the little squares are 1.5" finished, and I drafted a simple paper pieced template for the other units).
Colors: Coblat, Aqua, Lime with a white/grey/low volume background.
I really enjoyed digging into my blues and fussy cutting the center star.
Michigan State #10 Kelsey Kuipers and #6 Allyssah Ritterer combine to block Illinois #1 Morganne Criswell. #4 Halle Peterson is ready for the dig.
Two shot vertorama with the TS-E. Had to crop out a lot because I was low to the ground and was unable to level my tripod. I need to get one of those hotshoe bubble levels!
Block 3 from my Patchsmith Sampler Blocks book introduces quick (and very easy) triangle corners. For details pop over to The Patchsmith's blog.
Eton flogging block on display at the Eton museum. Boys would kneel over this to be birched on their bare bottoms.
CapitaLand Raffles City Chengdu is a building complex built in Chengdu, China designed by Steven Holl Architects. It was built from 2008 to 2012. The Sliced Porosity Block consists of 5 mixed-use towers with offices, apartments, retail and a hotel, which surround a large public plaza. The design is shaped to give the surrounding residential neighborhood enough daylight during the day. The angles of the sun prescribe the shape of the towers. The structure is an exoskeletal concrete frame.
Please feel free to use these for any art projects you may have. There is no copyright on these images.
Pieces pinned in place for 1st block (just couldn't wait to see how those pieces would look together!)
A block wall at the Caribbe Inn in Atlantic Beach, NC. The colors and geometry of the wall were striking.
Interactive Light Art Installation by Jeremy Lin, Jedy Chen, Dexter Hong of Plug & Play (Singapore) at the entrance of Marina Bay Link Mall, Marina Boulevard during i Light Singapore 2023.
Johnson City, NY. August 2017.
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If you would like to use THIS picture in any sort of media elsewhere (such as newspaper or article), please send me a Flickrmail or send me an email at natehenderson6@gmail.com
Germany vs Denmark - 1x1 Polearm at the International Medieval Combat World Championship 2016 - Montemor-o-Velho, Portugal
Lighting: Profoto D4 head with polarizing gel sheet inside large softbox reflected directly in black plexi, canceled out by Hoya circular polarizer on lens, but made visible in plastic subject due to birefringence.