Pastoral

Weekly summer travels between New York City and the Poconos revealed various fascinating landscapes as I tried to avoid traffic and explored alternate routes via back roads of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I’m consciously collecting images. Each image tends to tell a different story, yet they are all connected by being fragments of a larger picture that I am trying to form.  A picture of rural North America that I’m discovering at lower speeds and off the beaten paths. I’m acquiring a memory I never had. I arrived in New York City at the age of 24 and spent the next twenty some years in it, developing a nostalgia not for the country I left, but for the America I have never experienced.

And now, armed with a Hasselblad 500CM that requires a tripod, I am slowing down to match the images that somehow were stuck in my head all this time. Probably all the movies I have seen, possibly some books and of course photographs of others, all that visual information requiring a proof, a validation, not to match it exactly, but rather to form a new trace of a memory of a place that I have never experienced before...

POPS

Living in NYC for over twenty years I came across these places a lot - never quite sure what to make of them. It’s the type of place you see in the city quite often - a wide sidewalk with benches, an arcade, an atrium. All seem welcoming enough, but without a guarantee that the feeling is genuine.

Let us discover the POPS...or Privately Owned Public Space.   

The zoning laws of New York city allow developers to receive building offsets if a public space is provided in return. As such, these places lack the true nature of an organic public space and are projections of mostly corporate mindsets and a necessity for profit. Called Privately Owned Public Space or POPS for short they populate New York City as wider sidewalks, small parks, arcades and atriums. 

‘Open to the Public’ is a study that attempts to question the nature of these places by documenting them in a formal, detached way allowing a viewer as little distractions as possible. From a wide sidewalk to an austentatious aitrum, from a dark alley to an elevated park, all provide a fascinating study of highly curated public space. The series is shot on 4x5 film camera over a couple of years.

Night Transformations

The series was shot in Brooklyn and came about from walking my dog. I would take the same route during the day and again in the evening. At some point I have noticed the change that occurs once the daylight fades. The scene that looks rather ordinary during the day transforms into something very different - void of daylight, people and cars, lit by artificial light it opens to interpretations. The long exposures add to the mystery as it helps to gather the light not seen with a naked eye. 

As I progressed with a series I realized that there was a phantom quality to the images, not only because with an onset of the day the scene fades and becomes a part of the city fabric, but also because these bits of Brooklyn were quickly disappearing, replaced by new developments. These are the images of a reality that is no more.