New York on black and white film
There must be a million photos taken in New York city every day, but there seems to always be room for more. I spent a weekend walking around Manhattan with a Pen FT and a Stereo Realist loaded with Ilford HP5. I think that, when taking photos in a new city, it is nice to warm up by taking the famous and perhaps cliched shots you've seen before, and then dig a little deeper to get shots with your own experience dissolved in.
The trip was centered around art and architecture. The MET had an exhibit on David Hockney who is an artist who grew up near my hometown in Yorkshire and spent most of his life in California (where I spent some of my favorite years, too). He manages to capture the vibrancy of California in his paintings, and his double portraits are full of the metaphor and symbolism you'd expect from a renaissance master.
The buildings of New York, new and old, are engraved in our brains whether we have visited the city or not. One of the newer constructions is the Oculus - a subway hub that seems, to me, to invoke both life and death. Depending on your perspective or even mood, it may look like a rising phoenix or the white-washed rib cage of a giant being. It was the surprise highlight of my trip.
I made sure to point my camera at some of the more cliched sites, too - the Manhattan Bridge from Dumbo, some subway stations, the high line, street portraits of some guys smoking pipes. But you have seen all those before. I can't wait to be there again.
