mattblaze

I have mixed feelings about Le Corbusier's architecture (to say nothing of his urban planning philosophy - he clearly influenced Robert Moses), but I think the UN Secretariat building was one of his successes.

An aside: If you look at the full resolution version (downloadable on flickr), you can see the HF amateur radio antenna on the roof. Nerds are everywhere, even/especially at the UN. There's also a family taking a group picture on the street in front.

The UN Secretariat building was designed by an international team of architects (most notably Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer) and completed in 1950. It was the first important "International Style" modernist skyscraper in New York - exemplified here here by a simple, unadorned rectangle with reflective glass curtain walls on either side.

Glass box office buildings became almost cliche in mid-century NYC, but the UN remains unusual in being set apart in the skyline, uncrowded by neighbors.

Love them or hate them, mid-century rectangular glass curtain buildings like this are easy to dismiss as being "boring", but I think that misses something.

Reflections of the surroundings become part of the facade, which changes at different angles and throughout the day. I visited several times and made dozens of photos, all quite different, before I settled on this one, and there are infinitely many photos others could make, all unique. (Similar to the new World Trade Center in this regard).

Captured with the Phase One Achromatic back and the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR-Digaron lens, with the back shifted down 8.5mm to maintain the building's geometry. I brought out contrast in the sky with a polarizer, but otherwise used no color contrast filtration. The camera was positioned across the avenue about 10 meters up from the plaza level (at the bottom of the "canyon" of the skyline reflected in the bottom center of the building).

Captured with a DSLR and a 24mm shifting lens, shifted vertically to preserve geometry.

The tiny ghost town of Harvard, one of a series of often extravagantly named, largely abandoned communities along the Union Pacific Railroad and former Route 66 in the Mojave, was perhaps a victim of an Interstate highway system that passed it by.

I think the couch is still there.

The composition plays with the contrast between the ambitiously-sized sign and the humble, rustic old store. The photo is about shapes and scale.

This is also a bit of a nod to Grant Wood's famous 1930 painting, American Gothic. (See https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6565/american-gothic). Wood's painting was inspired by a grandiose, ornate attic window in an otherwise humble rural farmhouse that Wood happened upon during a road trip. The absurdly oversized, incongruously Googie-style arrow sign here reminded me of that.

Captured with a small mirrorless camera and 21mm lens, on a compact travel tripod.

This was a case where I hadn't really planned to make formal architectural photos and so had only a small camera with me, with no shifting lens. I made do by shooting wide with the camera level and cropping, which works but costs resolution and constrains how you can organize the frame. It worked well enough here, but I always feel like I'm leaving something on the table when I don't have the right gear with me.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] One of the benefits of being in NYC during the film era was the ready availability of high quality commercial labs - often open 24hrs - that served the commercial photography, advertising , and publishing industries. Particularly for E6 transparencies, you could get dip&dunk processing in less than an hour at any time of day for a few bucks/roll. Basically no commercial photographers, and even few fine art photographers, bothered to maintain dark rooms.

@dwallach @karlauerbach I think I genuinely miss about 20% of darkroom work, and say “good riddance” to the other 80%.

@[email protected] Early digital photography had lower resolution and more limited dynamic range. But so what? So does some film.

In the early 2000's, there was a lot of outright hostility toward digital photography from people who felt heavily invested in film technique. It's a relief that that silliness has by now pretty much disappeared, and now film is simply another photographic medium that you can choose to adopt (or not).

I went all digital about a year after this photo.

I love that so many creative people are going back to film today and keeping a lot of that technique from being lost (not to mention maintaining film and developer industries), but I doubt I'll join them. I don't buy the argument that film photography is somehow more "pure" (whatever that means), or that digital photography is "cheating" because it doesn't require certain skills. I'm glad I have film experience, but also glad to leave it behind.