AquaLangs

I often enjoy the challenges of photographing at night without a tripod, relying on steady hands and careful breathing, or makeshift platforms. Sodium vapor street lights are brutal on a camera’s auto white balance and often difficult, if not impossible to correct. As such, I rather let go of my quest for color perfection and intentionally let the sickly purple and orange hues shine.

In the wee hours of the morning on a work night, I was woken up by a ship’s fog horn. I live off Riverside Drive in Manhattan, alongside the Hudson River and near the George Washington Bridge. Up until that night, I had never heard any of the many vessels that traverse this waterway blast their emergency horns. I rushed to my rooftop on this unusually warm November night and found that the mild weather had caused the Hudson to fog over reminiscent of images of San Fransisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. So I grabbed my camera, tripod and a light coat, then headed out.

This is an “outtake” from a set of images I made in Szentendre, an artist community north of Budapest, Hungary. During the last few moments of autumn dusk, I found a glowing shop window display stuffed with loads of tungsten candles and surrounded by an ivy-like wall of grape vines. One of the best images I have made over the past five years was a part of this series, taken just minutes afterwards.

I once heard a fellow artist challenge another by asking the names of three famous living sculptors not including Richard Serra. Like most people when asked, she had no answer.

That is why my chisels are rusting away in a storage unit in Queens…

Another image from the interior of a museum. In 2006, the Tate Modern in London installed an interactive piece by Carsten Höller consisting of several spiraling slides that could be entered from different points throughout the galleries. Extending their operating hours and offering free admission attracted a different sort of crowd that is unusual for an art gallery, but right on par for a pre-pub crawl gathering.

Once, I was privileged enough to get access to the normally overcrowded Hermitage Museum after closing time for a short tour of some of its galleries followed by a private orchestral music concert. I possess a tendency to lag behind the group, and as this image shows, for good reason.