Death, But Not Today

After my neo-mystical encounter with the black-suited Gandhi the day before, I woke with a start at six the next morning and practically leapt into the shower. With steaming water washing over me, I was thinking about the pictures I took the day before and the ones I might take that day, about the twenty-something girl at rest in my bed, and about the kind of flash I should buy for my camera.

That’s when I saw it.

A driveway separates my Alphabet City tenement building from the nursing home next door, and a small window in my bathroom – right next to the showerhead – overlooks it. The driveway serves multiple purposes for the home, among them being the place where ambulances pick up the ailing and the dead. I never saw the body beneath the sheet; just the stretcher upon which it rested and the blue-shirted medics who fed it into the idling ambulance.

I, too, I thought to myself, I, too, will someday be ferried from this world. But not today. Not today.

Picture. Brooklyn, New York: May 27, 2007, 347 Broadway, Las Palmera de mi Peublo, A Romantic Rivalry Leads Two Men to Fight One Another With Knives in a South Williamsburgh Restaurant, Leaving Both Men Seriously Wounded and the Inside of the Restaurant Sprayed With Blood, Here, One of the Contenders is Prepared for Transportation to a Hospital.

Is This Cop an Asshole or What?

First of all, he, in his infinite wisdom, the bounds of which obviously exceed that of the Founders of this country, who, in their judgment, believed that freedom of the press was as necessary component (a sine qua non, if you will allow lawyerly language) of an open society, but who cares what some old white men thought, right?, so, in His infinite wisdom, this one, lone cop decides a press photographer shouldn’t take a picture of a breaking news event that’s happening at 14^th Street and 4^th Avenue – the middle of Manhattan for God’s sake!

That’s #1.

But then, as if that wasn’t enough, this asshole, otherwise known as Patrolman Evans, in the presumptively legitimate exercise of his discretion to maintain order, Asshole Evans makes our humble press photographer sit at his feet like some kind of captured war-prize that he’s entitled to have his way with, notwithstanding the fact that she’s newly-wed and quite possibly pregnant.

That’s #2.

Now, given what, on its face, seems like extreme action on Patrolman Evan’s part, one would think that the news event our press photographer, who, by the way, is Julia Xanthos of the Daily News, one would think that the news event Julia was trying to cover was of some extraordinary sort that necessitated secrecy in order for the objective of the police action to be obtained. If this was the case then one could understand, though one might still disagree with, the Patrolman’s decision to arrest Julia.

But this was emphatically not the case. A two-alarm fire broke out on 4^th Avenue and 13^th Street, bringing the City’s press corps to the scene. As the fire was burning, a woman got her foot run over by a car. So when Julia arrives and sees medics attending to a woman on a stretcher she does what every other press photographer in the world would have done – take her fucking picture. Ordinary run-of-the-mill stuff. But this day it results in an arrest.

That’s #3.

So is this cop an asshole or what?

In the Beginning

So it began with a hangover.

Truth be told many, if not most, of the days following my graduation from college began with hangovers as despondency set in over my failure to find a job. But, however hazy my head was, the day was dazzling, blue and bright. And I, feeling like the future was fast diminishing, found myself standing – camera in hand – on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-Second Street.

That’s when the voice called out from behind me, “You just missed the madness.”

When I turned I saw a dark-skinned, South Asian man with long, kinky black hair in a black suit, camera in his hand.

“Huh?"

“Donald Trump. He just came out of the Tent,” the stranger said, motioning with his head over his shoulder to the huge white tent erected behind him on the lawn in Bryant Park.

“Oh,” I replied. “Thanks.”

Like I give a shit about Donald Trump, I think to myself.

But the stranger’s near-mystical intercession did draw my attention to the fact that it was Fashion Week – that twice yearly event during which New York-based designers showcase their new creations before the high arbiters of fashion who anoint or condemn them, the rich and powerful from around the world who can afford to purchase them, and the common folk who, from behind barricades, stand in the street on their work-weary feet hoping to feel the gaze of a star fall upon their flesh or, at the least, for but a fleeting glimpse of one.

Fashion Week, I realized with a start, is where I would begin.

Picture. New York, New York: May 23, 2007, Affordable Housing Protest March, A Coalition of New Yorkers Hold Hands Around Stuyvesant Town and peter Cooper Village Before Marching West Across 14th Street then to the Swank W Hotel in Union Square, to Protest the Lack of Affordable Housing, Here, One Woman's Sign Succinctly Express What is At Stake.

On the Catwalk

Catwalks are not just for models.

There is a catwalk suspended beneath the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is made of metal-mesh plates, square in shape. Welded together end-to-end, the plates are suspended by half-inch cables from the metal framework supporting the pedestrian walkway above. There are cable handrails, but they don’t lessen the vertigo that wells within you as you step from the solid roadway onto the catwalk. It creaks.

Through the metal squares beneath your boots, you see clear through to the river below -- 150 or so feet down. You can almost feel yourself falling. You grip the cable handrails so tight it slows you down. As you move along, salty ocean air flows swiftly and steadily across your face. The wind fills your ears, sounding like the small, hollow vastness of a seashell. You pause. You wonder if you should take a picture to document your passage, to prove you’ve been here, then, at once, recalling why you’re there in the first place, you release your grip on the cables and break into a full-tilt sprint.

There’s a jumper on the bridge, on the Manhattan-bound side, and you’ve come to take his picture. But you've got to hurry up, because these things tend to end quickly.

The police have shut down traffic in both directions over the bridge. This is how you’ve managed to access the catwalk at all: by sneaking up the Brooklyn-bound roadway, body plastered against the bulkhead of the bridge, not out in the middle of the roadway where you’d be easily seen. Your original plan was to shoot through the cable-and-steel latticework of the bridge to the other side, where the jumper is, but once you see this catwalk and realize you can reach the other side, you go for it.

New York, New York: May 21, 2007, On the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan-Bound Roadway, After Police Successfully Talk a 19 Year-Old Jumper Off the Rigging of the Brooklyn Bridge, Emergency Medical Technicians Wheel Him to a Waiting Ambulance.

Ape Shall Never Kill Ape

It started with a hangover. But there's some other stuff you'll probably want to know first, so we'll get to the hangover in a minute.

Murder and mayhem is what I do. It pays my rent and puts food on the table. No I don't kill people. I take pictures for a living. The more blood, the more tears, the more fire, the more wreckage in it -- the better. In the media world, its technically called covering "spot" or "breaking" news. I call it covering the street.

New York City is my beat, and my home. I grew-up in the Bronx and, after being caught in a wave of what academics call "white flight" in the late1970s, Yonkers -- a first-ring suburb along the Bronx's northern border. After a long absence, I returned to the City in 2003 to finish college. On a gray day late last May, with the clouds spitting rain from the sky, I snatched my sheepskin from NYU and jumped into the fountain in Washington SquarePark..

I was triumphant, but the exulatation was short-lived: I couldn't find a job.

So my career as a shooter started with a hangover. But that story will have to wait, this entry is too long already.

Picture. Bronx, New York (Soundview): May 10, 2007, In Front of 1145 Noble Avenue, "Ape Shall Never Kill Ape," After Her Step-Father is Shot to Death, A Daughter Tries to Rush Past Police Lines as Her Step-Father's Body is Removed from the Scene and Loaded Into a Morgue Van, But She is Restrained by Kin, Whose T-Shirt Reads "Ape Shall Never Kill Ape."