Background
Notes on New York Photographs
When I moved to New York in 1979, the rough edges of the city were apparent. Generally I find a bit of disorder to be more interesting than the pristine, so this was not a problem. It was not until I had lived here for some time that I realized how much this solid, established city was actually in flux. It became apparent in the openings and closings, destruction and rebuilding, decay and renewal that New York City was continually changing. As I learned more about the city I realized that often even the land under my feet was man made, fill used to turn portions of rivers into marketable real estate. This is not a recent phenomenon, but a basic characteristic of the city that had been around since colonial days. Even the tavern that was the site of the farewell dinner for General Washington at the end of the Revolutionary War was built on colonial land fill.
The photographs I take in the city are not meant to preserve monuments or be records of structures that may soon be gone because of obsolescence, development or attack, but an effort to capture and share the experiences of this city. While New York s structure may be changing, the experience of it is even more fleeting. The combination of the buildings, spaces, people, signs and light create the experiences that make my city. This internal city is what you can see in the images.
The photographs in this portfolio cover a large range of time and a variety of photographic techniques. In the early eighties, the limited ability of a photographic image to convey the experience of the city became an issue. The color photographs up to that time did a fairly good job of capturing the light and structure of the city, but they did not capture the feel of the spaces or the sweeping experience where many different objects and views combine to create a specific moment. While many photographers have adopted large format cameras to increase the detail of the individual image and wide-angle lenses to bring more into the frame, I found that approach unsatisfactory. The city was too dynamic to stand still for the ponderous process of photographing with a view camera on a tripod, and regardless of the focal length, no lens used could bring all of the elements that I am responding to together into a single frame. I took a cue from the way vision works to guide my approach. When going around the city I find myself seeing in two modes, looking around with multiple views being combined in my mind to create a sense of place and looking at something specific to fill in the details. The multiframe images capture that sense of place I develop looking around while the stereo photographs are close to the experience of looking at something specific.
If you have any questions about these images or would be interested in help seeing the stereo images in 3D, please contact me:
Robert.L.Covington@gmail.com
