I’ve been meaning to write something about Brandon Stanton, AKA Humans of New York (further known as HONY) for a dog’s age now. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know that a: I’m a fan of good street photography, and b: I’m conflicted by a number of that genre’s current practitioners, whose work I sometimes find tacky and unneccesarily confrontational. Not so with HONY; I always got the impression with Brandon’s work that it was done by someone who had a real affection for the people he photographs.
Of course, photography can be a bit like acting; you don’t want to read too much into a photographer’s style or choice of subject matter, at least as far as what it might say about them as a person. Having said that, what I love and respect about the work I’ve seen on HONY is that it always seems to be done as much from the standpoint of what the photographer gives to his subject just as much as what he’s taking from (or of) them.
And as it turns out, I probably wasn’t all that far off in the first place. HONY is running a fundraiser on IndieGogo, in partnership with Tumblr. Details below:
Our Mission
Tumblr and Humans of New York are teaming up to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. For ten days beginning November 11th, we will be documenting and sharing the stories of those affected by the storm. We hope to show all sides of the story, featuring not only the victims of the storm but also the first responders and volunteers who are helping them recover. Hurricane Sandy revealed the power of nature, as well as the power of humanity. We aim to document both. By doing so, we hope to encourage YOU to contribute the relief efforts.
The purpose of this fundraiser is to collect donations. However, to spice things up a bit, Tumblr and HONY are teaming up to provide incentives and rewards for donating. Tumblr is throwing in some cool Tumblr gear, and HONY is providing prints and other goodies. We are covering these expenses ourselves so absolutely all money raised will be going to relief efforts.
Where the Money is Going
100% OF PROCEEDS will be going to the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation– a highly respected, family-run charity which has been officially endorsed by many NYC officials. The money will immediately be used to provide much-needed resources to those areas hit hardest by the storm. Tunnel to Towers is very proud of the fact that no donations are being spent on overhead, and ALL hurricane funds are going directly to relief.
A few days ago, I posted about Will Salomon Orellana’s Help Portrait project to assist Hurricane Sandy victims. He was kind enough to send along this update:
Specific Help-Portrait Event for Hurricane Sandy families who were affected…..
MEETING MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12th, 2012
289 Grand Street (Btwn. Roebling & Havemeyer Street)
Brooklyn, NY 11211 (Williamsburg)
Time: 6pm
Sorry I have been off radar….I finally got power back myself and am back online….
In a nutshell, I have created a Facebook group page for us to communicate better as many people on this forum have been inactive for years…
Please follow the link and add yourself to the group. I will then agree to have you on the group. Very easy.
I am looking to focus this year on the areas most affected by Hurricane Sandy in NYC. Sites I am organizing in are Rockaways, Breezy Point, Staten Island and Coney Island….
We have a fast turnaround time here folks this is what we need:
This is a group for Photographers, Make up artist and anyone who wants to participate in volunteering for this years Help-Portrait NYC 2012 (Free Family Portraits) specifically for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Many of them have lost everything including family photos. The goal is to create a loving space where we can offer free family portraits as a gesture of levity and joy during this time.
What we need:
-Lead Photographers to connect with a community based organization to host the event and be the primary liaison.
-Photographers with full lighting set up
-People who can edit and print the images for the families
-Make up artist and/or Hair dressers
-General volunteers to greet, sign in families, share a smile and overall assistance.
-Donations for the paper and ink
Although I suppose I couldn’t be blamed if he just wandered into my shot…
What brings this on, you ask? Having had power but no internet for much of last week, I set about cleaning up (read: getting rid of huge amounts of stuff on) my hard drive. Since most of what’s on there is photographs, I found myself going through lots of old — and sometimes not-so-old — photos, thinning the herd. And in folder after folder, I found bird shots galore.
I like birds well enough, provided they don’t poop in my general direction.* But, really, Hitchcock has nothing on my collection. I have scores of bird shots. No, scratch that, it’s probably closer to hundreds. And the thing is, I live in northern New Jersey. Around here, you get finches, pigeons, and sea gulls, and precious little else. I’ve never seen a heron or crane perched on the Hoboken pier (well, not that kind of crane, anyway).
Now, maybe you’ve never taken a bird’s photo in your life. But don’t go getting all smug just yet. My point isn’t (just) the birds.
Here’s the thing: we all have things that we’re drawn to, for one reason or another… things that we’ll instinctively photograph if they’re placed in front of us. For some things (our families, for instance) that’s not so bad. But for others… well, how many birds, or clouds, or sunsets do we really need to photograph?
“But it’s a gorgeous sunset/bird/hood ornament/Shriner’s fez,” you protest. Maybe it is, and maybe there’s a point, sometimes, in taking photos of those things. But if we’re going to go to the trouble of making a photo of something, maybe we should take an extra split second to ask whether it’s worth making the photo. And if the question isn’t worth asking, maybe — just maybe, now — the photo isn’t worth the space it takes up on your memory card or hard drive.
The point, after all that? Well, if you’re in the habit of shooting something just because, perhaps it’s time to rethink, and to come up with a better reason than “just because.” Find a new subject, or the discipline to find something truly different within your usual or favorite subjects. We don’t necessarily need to shoot as though our lives depended on it (hopefully it never comes to that), but it’s good sometimes to shoot as though something of our creativity and artistic sensibility depends on it, instead of shooting something “because it’s there.”
*Especially a bird with an outrageous French accent pooping in your general direction.
Watch this space, because I will be adding to this post as more information comes in. If you’re a photographer who’s coordinating an event, please leave information in the comments section below, or email thefirst10000@gmail.com
Will have more information in the next coming days….
I am organizing a HELP-Portrait Group Event for families affected during Sandy in The Rockaway’s…I just visited and it is totally devastated. Especially Brezzy Point. I will update when I have more info on Location…Am trying to connect with a Church there. I will have more information in the next few days…..But in the meantime, I would like to form a group of Photog’s who can volunteer…Please hit me up and let me know if you can. and assist……This is a very special one as most families in this affected area have lost everything! Peace and blessings…-Will (will@willsalomon.com)
Souls Rebuilt:
A portrait charity founded just hours after Sandy swept through NJ, Souls.Rebuilt. offers “complimentary family sessions for families who have lost their pictures due to the devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought”. They’re currently seeking both volunteer photographers and families in need of assistance. More information is available on their website, or you can follow them on Facebook or Twitter.
Via Joe’s Pub:
This link will take you to a series of links for artists of all stripes whose works, studios, or livelihoods have been impacted by Sandy. Since the Pub (a.k.a. the Public Theater) is Manhattan-based, there’s quite a bit of information that’s mostly germane to artists in the five boroughs. However, some of the organizations and resources listed also work farther afield, so if you’re elsewhere in the tri-state area, take a look… certainly couldn’t hurt.
And again: More updates will follow as I receive more information. If you’re running a project, or know someone who is, please pass the information along!
Google Maps has an interactive map that’s filled with information on storm damage, power outages, gas availability, and quite a lot more. You can find it here: http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy
Shore Helpers is another nifty resource I’ve come across that seeks to connect those who want to help with those who need it: http://www.shorehelpers.com/
Donate. If it’s a national charity like the American Red Cross, they may have procedures in place to ensure your donation goes where you’d like; if you’re not sure, ask, and don’t be shy about making your wishes clear. If it’s something tangible — food or clothing, for example — call in advance to find out what’s needed. This can vary widely based not only on geography, but also on what the organizations on the ground already have stockpiled, or have already received. They may well be up to their ears in canned goods but short on toiletries, for instance; a tube of Colgate may go much farther than a can of soup.
Also find out if your employer will match your donations, either by percentage or in full. If they do, what you give will be multiplied that much more. If they don’t, consider donating online or by text message. The funds will often be available much faster to organizations much faster than they would’ve been if you’d sent a check. And don’t forget smaller, often local organizations. Some of these, naturally, will be providing disaster assistance. Others may have missions not related to Sandy at all, but they’ll still need your help. People are unfailingly generous when disaster strikes, but often the donations flow to larger, better-known organizations at the expense of smaller ones, while organizations that aren’t doing disaster-related work often get hit hard at times like this because the money’s flowing elsewhere.
And since we’re all (or mostly) photographers here, use your talents to get the word out, along with visuals. Idealist.org is a good starting point to network with charities and NGO’s in your area, as is your nearest Red Cross or United Way chapter. I’ve also seen a couple of dedicated photo charities spring up in the wake of Sandy, and I’m in the process of researching those now (as well as reaching out to some established photo charities to see what they may have in the pipeline). If you’re short on time but would like to donate money, be sure to check Charity Navigator first.
In either case, do your due diligence; you want your time, your money and your talent put to their best use, rather than being wasted.
Questions, comments, suggestions, or further resources? Let me know in the comments section, below.
The aftermath of Sandy has left me sans internet access for the time being, which means that there’s a lot in the queue that… well, is going to remain in the queue for the time being.
Right now, however, that’s the least of my worries. In contrast to Irene last year, the area where I live now has gotten off relatively easily. Trees down, power outages, gas lines reminiscent of the ’70’s, but nothing major, and certainly nothing compared to the catastrophic flooding and damage seen hereabouts this time last year.
I wish that I could say the same of my hometown, and much of the rest of the Jersey shore. Large sections of Brick, Point Pleasant, Seaside Heights, Mantoloking, Asbury Park, LBI, and several other towns up and down the coast have either been severely damaged, or altered beyond recognition. The photos that’ve trickled across my newsfeed are heartbreaking enough; I’m afraid of what it’s going to look like once I’ve had the chance to go back and wander the places I grew up.
In the days ahead, once I’m back on line, I’ll be sharing resources for those who need help, and also for those who’d like to pitch in. This being a photography blog, I’ll be looking for opportunities for photographers to do what they do best, and pitch in where we can. If you know of, or are affiliated with, photo charities involved in the relief effort, please contact me (thefirst10000 at gmail.com)
For my friends, family, and neighbors back home on the shore, hang in there as best you can. My thoughts and prayers, however inadequate, are with all of you.
The whole crop-sensor versus full frame sensor thing never quite made sense to me, ’til I saw the difference between a 50mm lens on a crop camera versus the exact same lens on a full frame sensor. If this whole thing already made perfect sense to you, feel free to skip this post. For those of you to whom the whole thing makes about as much sense as Finnegan’s Wake — in Swahili — read on.
Sensors come in several sizes, from the thumbnail-sized sensors in your average point-and-shoot to the 120mm sensors in medium-format cameras. If we’re taking a 35mm film frame as our point of reference (also the size of the sensor in a “full frame” camera), any sensor smaller than 35mm is going to have a crop/multiplier factor when used with 35mm lenses. You’ll recall that some time back we talked about the difference between digital and optical zoom, where digital zoom essentially crops the image captured by a sensor at its native resolution; the crop factor introduced by a smaller sensor does the same thing, minus the software trickery.
Here’s why it didn’t exactly make sense to me. Lenses have different fields of view at different focal lengths. A fisheye lens (say, 8mm) can give you a 180 degree angle of view. A 50mm lens, sometimes called a “normal” lens, closely approximates your natural field of vision. A much longer lens, like a 300mm lens, gives a much tighter field of view (around 8 degrees).* You’d think (or I thought, at least) that regardless of the size of the sensor, the photo would be the same because the lens’s field of view at a given focal length would be the same in any case, so a lens racked out to 300mm would have the same FOV whether you used it on a full-frame sensor, a crop sensor, or a point-and-shoot.
50mm f/1.8 Shot in Crop Format
Only it isn’t quite. So how’s this crop thing work? By way of analogy, think of it like this. Let’s say you’ve got a slide projector that’s ten feet from a three foot wide screen. The image fills the screen with no problems. The projector is your lens; the image coming out of the projector is the “image circle”; the screen is your sensor. When you’re using a crop sensor, you’re not moving the projector relative to the screen; it’s simply changing the area covered by the projected image. So if you put a two foot wide screen in front of the projector, you’re going to notice that a much smaller part of the image is visible on the screen (with some of the image spilling over to the area beyond it). A DX lens has a smaller image circle (in essence, focusing the “projector’s” beam more tightly), so it’s going to fill a smaller “screen” (sensor) easily enough, but it’s going to come up short on anything larger.
This is also, incidentally, why a lens that exhibits light falloff or softness in the edges and/or corners on a FF camera generally looks better on a crop camera. Most lenses — at least once you stop them down a bit — are going to be reasonably sharp in the center. The part that’s sharp is the part that’s being projected onto the smaller sensor, whereas a larger sensor’s going to also incorporate the dodgy bits from the perimeter of the frame.
Therein lies a lesson. Some people — and I was one of them — purchase full frame lenses when they have a crop sensor camera just in case we decide at some point to jump to a full frame camera. When you’re reading reviews of lenses, therefore, one of the things to pay attention to is who’s using the lens as they review it. It’s not unheard of for a lens to get rave reviews from DX/crop users only for the FF people to point out flaws in the lens’s image quality. If you have no plans to switch formats, you may not have much to worry about (though other issues, like lens flare, coma and color fringing will typically manifest no matter what body you’re using). But if you’re going to be switching at some point, pay attention to those flaws. You may be willing to put up with them, but at the very least, go in with eyes open.
Oh, and about the images accompanying this post: the camera wasn’t moved relative to the bookcase (it was on a tripod). I’m also using the same lens (a 50mm 1.8) in both shots. The only change is that the first shot was taken in the camera’s full-frame mode, while the other uses its crop mode. So on full frame, the 50mm looks… well, like a 50mm looks. In crop mode, it acts more like a 75mm.
If I haven’t been as clear on this as I’ve tried to be, feel free to sound off with your questions (or better examples) in the comments section below. We’ll be revisiting this topic (albeit from a different angle) soon.**
For years now, no camera discussion forum has been worth its salt if it hasn’t included a thread or two speculating about how neat it’d be if someone would stick a full-frame sensor into a crop-sensor body and slap an affordable price tag on it. Rumors have come and gone and come again, but now we’ve got the real deal with the Nikon D600, which was announced barely three weeks ago, and has actually been available in stores since its September 18 release date (if you’re even a casual Nikonian, you know this is nothing to take for granted). Read below for the results of real-world use (read: no test charts or silly photos of brick walls) from a real live photographer.
Sign
The D600’s $2,100.00 price tag isn’t exactly pocket change, but as full-frame cameras go, it’s enough to put this Nikon in the “affordable” category, relatively speaking. The price is held down by a few things; it doesn’t have the D800’s 36MP sensor or control surfaces, or a huge buffer, or the D4’s frame rate. Its body largely carries over from the D7000, from the remarkably similar design, measurements and weight to the use of titanium only for the back and sides. With all that being said, this isn’t a no-frills camera; there’s an awful lot of capability packed into a comparatively small package. Read on to find out more.
Hands (Crop; 1600 ISO)
Sensor: If you’re the kind of person who obsesses over lab tests, the DXOMark score for the D600 is 94 (third only to the Nikon D800 and D800E, which came in at 95 and 96; more on that here). If, on the other hand, you’re concerned more with the resultant photos… Look, the thing’s got 24.3 megapixels. You can, in other words, crop like an overzealous barber and still get good shots out of this puppy. There are caveats, of course. Higher-megapixel sensors have a tendency to show the flaws of the lenses put in front of them (or of the photographer behind them), not to mention that the file sizes are much larger. Color depth is very good, and the dynamic range is… well, it’s a good reason to give this camera a close look if you hadn’t already.
Fireman (Crop, 3200 ISO)
Ergonomics and Controls: this is, naturally, highly subjective; one thing I’ve always liked about Nikon is that they feel right in your hands, and the D600 is no exception. There are plenty of knobs and buttons, which makes a huge difference when it comes to changing settings quickly (if it has, or can be assigned, a knob or button, that’s one less thing you’ve got to hunt for in a menu). Some of the buttons do double duty, controlling different functions depending on how you’re using the camera at the time; in other words, the buttons that control ISO and white balance will control your ability to zoom in and out on an image during playback. Some people see this as a major drawback… I’m not one of them. Like anything else, you adapt. The D600 is further helped by the inclusion of user-customizable menus, as well as two banks’ worth of user settings on the mode dial, which can be useful if you’re making lots of wholesale changes to your settings for certain situations. So if, for example, you’re doing product photography strictly for the web, you can dial in smaller file sizes, different color and ISO settings, et cetera, and recall them on the dial rather than having to set everything manually each time you want to shoot that way. As an added bonus, both halves of the mode dial now lock, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally changing from Aperture Priority to Manual when you take the camera out of your bag.
Fireman (Crop, 6400 ISO)
ISO: Native ISO spans 100-6400, with a “Low” setting of 50 and a “HI2” of 25,600 ISO. I was fully prepared to write off the HI modes altogether; on the D7000, 6400 was useable, but just barely, and by Hi2, it was as noisy as a bar band. Even without noise reduction, you can get useable prints up to 6400. Noise is very well handled in the upper ranges. The pleasant surprise here is in the reaches beyond 6400. It’s still noisy in the Hi modes, and there’s still loss of detail, but it’s held down much better on this camera than on the D7000. What’s more, even where there’s grain, it looks (up to 6400) like film grain. I’m not seeing the kind of luminance noise with the 600 that I’ve noticed with nearly every other camera I’ve tried – even in RAW, or in JPG with noise reduction turned off.
Metering: I’m finding the metering on this camera to be a tad more reliable than on the D7000. Left to its own devices (at least in matrix metering, which I tend to use most often), the 7000 had a tendency to slightly overexpose. The D600 blows fewer highlights in Matrix metering than the D7000, and also has visibly improved dynamic range (the inclusion of in-camera HDR is a nice touch, but I haven’t used it nearly enough – or used dedicated HDR programs like Photomatix at all – to be able to say exactly how well it does HDR).
Victory (Crop, 12500 ISO)
Autofocus: 39 focus points with 11 cross-type sensors. While I don’t have the fancy gear of the folks at Popular Photography or DP Review, I will say that the AF is noticeably faster in low light, even with my finicky, screw-drive 105 f/2.8D mounted to the camera. The one thing that may pose an issue for you, depending on what you shoot and how, is the grouping of those AF sensors. It’s essentially the same grouping as on the 7000, and in the same amount of space. In other words, what gave you pretty generous coverage on a DX sensor instead gives you a relatively tight grouping toward the center of an FX sensor. If you’re used to shooting with a single sensor point (or coming from a camera like the D60, which has only three evenly-spaced focus points on a single horizontal plane), this doesn’t present a huge issue.
Victory (Crop, 25600)
Battery: The D600 uses the same EN-EL15 that’s used in the D7000 and D800. It’s CIPA rated for 900-1050 shots. I haven’t shot quite that many frames (yet) with this camera, but my experience using the same battery in the D7000 bears this out. Other factors (overuse of the burst mode, lots of chimping, using the onboard flash, cold weather) can, of course, lead to your results varying.
Finder: 100% coverage, .71x magnification. It’s big and bright, with the option to overlay grid lines, plus a frame that shows the DX coverage area if you’re using a DX lens, or if you set the camera to shoot in crop mode using an FX lens. Unlike previous and other current Nikon FX cameras, the 600 carries over the square viewfinder found on the DX line (not that I mind; it means not having to buy another eye cup for the finder).
Lenses: You can use practically anything with a Nikon F mount on this camera, including DX lenses, from your old AI-S lenses, to the more recent 2.8D screw drive AF lenses (the drive’s built in, as it was on the 7000) to the newest VR G lenses. If you’re weighing the move from a dedicated DX camera to FF but have hesitated ‘til now because you needed the additional magnification provided by the crop sensor (and/or didn’t want to lose too much resolution), you’ll be happy to know that this shoots at a respectable 10 megapixels in crop mode, so you can still use that 70-300 like a 450mm at the long end if you need to.
Video: I’m a stills guy. I can count on my fingers and toes how many videos I’ve shot with any cameras I’ve used that had the capability, and would only need one hand for the number of those videos I’ve actually kept. I bring this up by way of suggesting you take this section with a grain of salt. Video quality was, to my eyes, pretty darned good in daylight, but not so much in lower light. The edge still goes to Canon (or Sony) on video performance, though Nikon’s improved significantly since they introduced SLR video with the D90. Audio’s spotty, but then again, I didn’t expect much from the audio to begin with; nearly any non-video camera that relies on a built-in condenser mic has poor sound quality, and picks up every whirr, click, and hum from the camera’s and lens’ guts. If you’re serious about DSLR video, get a shotgun mic. But then, if you’re serious about DSLR video, you already knew that.
Extras: A strap, which is the usual cheap, garish and and uncomfortable nylon Nikon strap; if you haven’t already, I’d suggest buying something more comfy (like the Crumpler Crumpler Industry Disgrace***), especially since your neck’s going to feel like hamburger if you’ve got anything larger than a 50mm on the camera for any length of time. There’s also a USB cable, the little thingy that protects your hot shoe, that other little doohickey*that you’re supposed to put over the viewfinder if you’re not going to be shooting at eye level, another slab o’ plastic that covers the rear LCD, instruction manuals in English and Spanish (which you probably won’t read, choosing instead to ask on the NikonRumors forum, you scallywag), one EN-EL15 battery (with charger) and a body cap.
The Verdict:
Pros include excellent dynamic range, very good high ISO performance and color depth, good ergonomics, plenty of manual controls and buttons, quick buffering, and all the perks that go with shooting full-frame packed into a body with the form factor of the prosumer D7000. Cons** include a tightly-grouped 39-point AF system, slightly slower burst rate, and 1/200 flash sync.
Is this the camera you need? Well, that all depends. As with any other camera, a lot has to do with expectations. My last camera, traded in toward this one, was a D7000. That wasn’t an easy choice to make; the 7000 was an excellent camera, and if I had to do it over again, I’d buy another without hesitation. I heard gripes about the 7000 (notably, hot pixels, and sometimes gimpy AF, especially in low light). I didn’t have the same hot pixels that some early adopters had (one of the benefits of waiting), and given that I was coming to the 7000 from a point-and-shoot that could be poky in broad daylight, I found the 7000 a joy to use. If you’re stepping up to the 600 from an older generation of the D series (say, anything from a D40 to about a D80), this camera is a quantum leap.
Build quality is identical to the D7000, and the frame rate in burst is half-a-frame slower. If those things are deal breakers for you, plunk down the extra $900.00 for a D800 for the added build quality (and 36MP) and a more evenly-distributed 51 point AF. Or, for just (just?) an additional $3,800.00, you can get 10 frames per second, 51 point AF, and the build quality (not to mention concomitant weight) of a freakin’ tank with a D4.
I could easily sum up the D600 in two words: Holy shit. I’m a bit given to profanity as it is, but this camera had me cursing like a sailor on shore leave. Over and over again, it’s performed better than I expected: quick AF, jaw-dropping performance at high ISOs, the ability to crop with impunity, the lovely bokeh that’s the reason you buy fast lenses to begin with, and superb image quality.
If you’re on the fence because you’ve got a D90, D7000, or D300, all I can tell you is, put this puppy through its paces. Its controls are very close to those of the 7000 (with a couple of minor variations), and its dimensions and weight are so close that you won’t feel the difference in your hands. If you’re looking for the successor to the D700, this could well be that camera (keeping the caveats above in mind). If you’re looking for a backup body for your D800… well, that all depends. In terms of image quality, the D600 gives the D800 a run for its money, but the controls on both are very different, so unless your other camera’s a D7000, that could prove to be frustrating. With all that said, here’s the bottom line: if the compromises that come with this camera are the kind that you can live with (for me, they were) then this is a damn good camera for the price.
**Whether some of these things are “cons,” of course, depend on your needs and expectations.
***Amazon affiliate links. Your purchases through these links help keep The First 10,000 going. Thanks!
A note on the photos: The file sizes on the original photos, as you’d expect on a camera with a 24MP sensor, are enormous. The photos above have, therefore, been cropped and downsampled. The only one that’s had any processing applied beyond in-camera noise reduction (set at Normal) is the flower photo above.
I seem to have fallen a bit behind, both with the writing and the photography. I hope to be getting both back up to speed over the weekend. Thanks for your patience!
Every year around this time, for the last decade or so, I think about writing about 9/11, and I always tend to come up short. It’s not that there’s any shortage of memory or feeling there; like nearly anyone else old enough to remember that day — especially if, like me, you live in the shadow of NYC — I can recall where I was that day in more detail than I remember nearly any other day of my life, nearly down to the minute. The problem is moreso one of volume. So much has been spoken, written, filmed, and repeated that it feels like anything I’d have to say would be but a drop in the ocean. And yet, I can’t quite shake that day, and can’t quite shake the image that made the whole thing immediately and terribly real for me.
The photo that accompanies this post wasn’t chosen at random. The first time I saw Roger Mark Rasweiler (or his photo, at any rate) would’ve been some time around ten thirty on September 12, 2001. I was just getting on the train back home from work, and I saw a flyer just like this one in several of the train cars. I stopped to study the face, said a small prayer, and hoped against hope that this kindly-looking gentleman had just been detoured to Queens, or maybe a hospital somewhere in Manhattan or Hoboken. 36 hours after the towers fell, that wish didn’t yet seem as futile as it would in the days ahead, or as it did when I visited Union Square a week later, only to find the faces of the missing staring back at me by the thousands from subway cars, PATH trains, fences, and storefronts.
What does any of this have to do with photography? Maybe nothing at all. On the other hand, maybe everything. Those initial hours, after all, were a flood of words and images. The sheer volume alone would’ve rendered the lot of them overwhelming, but when you add the emotional heft — all the grief, confusion, anger and sadness with which every page and every frame was weighted — you’re left with something nearly staggering. It might just be me, but there was, and there sometimes remains, something in all of it that defies our attempts to cut it down to size, much less to make sense of it. Of course, it’s hardly the first or last time that would happen; we’ve had other catastrophes visited upon us before and since, and each time the end result is much the same: we’re practically struck dumb by the weight of history and documentation behind it all.
Time and time again, we hear the numbers of casualties thrown out when we discuss catastrophic events, be they the six million of the Holocaust, the three thousand of 9/11, the hundreds of thousands in the Boxing Day tsunami. Those numbers, by themselves, don’t illuminate much of the larger story; they reduce the victims to a single, faceless mass. How do we wrap our heads and hearts around something so enormous?
Something of the answer — for me, at least — is in that photo of Mark Rasweiler. Those single, still images invite us to step away from the whorl of emotion and motion; they provide a stillness, a point of reflection, in which we can pause and begin to attempt to understand. Just as importantly — perhaps even more importantly — they give us a sense of the human scale of inhuman events. Those three thousand weren’t a monolithic, homogeneous mass; they were three thousand individuals.
We were reminded again this year, as we’ll be in the years ahead, to never forget those three thousand. I don’t disagree. But as I enter my twelfth year with the memory of Mark Rasweiler, and the others who died with him, might I suggest we remember them one frame, one person, at a time?
Postscript:
This article appeared a month after the attacks, and is one author’s take on the Missing posters and spontaneous memorials that sprung up in New York:
I’ve been meaning to write something about Brandon Stanton, AKA Humans of New York (further known as HONY) for a dog’s age now. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know that a: I’m a fan of good street photography, and b: I’m conflicted by a number of that genre’s current practitioners, whose work I sometimes find tacky and unneccesarily confrontational. Not so with HONY; I always got the impression with Brandon’s work that it was done by someone who had a real affection for the people he photographs.
***), especially since your neck’s going to feel like hamburger if you’ve got anything larger than a 50mm on the camera for any length of time. There’s also a USB cable, the little thingy that protects your hot shoe, that other little doohickey*that you’re supposed to put over the viewfinder if you’re not going to be shooting at eye level, another slab o’ plastic that covers the rear LCD, instruction manuals in English and Spanish (which you probably won’t read, choosing instead to ask on the NikonRumors forum, you scallywag), one EN-EL15 battery (with charger) and a body cap.
(you’ll want a spare battery)
