There Is Always Something Coming Toward You

This post is about one of the photos I have installed at 305 Van Brunt Street — see previous post. I plan on writing about each of the 11 pieces in the show this month.

About 5 years ago, I started carrying a digital point-and-shoot with me on my rides in an attempt to capture the brief, but vivid sights and sounds of my 20-mile bicycle commute in New York City. I was inspired by Tom Phillips "humdrum epic" 20 SITES n Years, but instead of taking one photo of one place over the course of years, I was going to photo the entirety of the commute every day. Of course, originally I was going to try and emulate his project a little more closely by taking a photo-a-day off the Manhattan Bridge. Turns out I'm not patient enough to stop in the middle of a ride to set up a shot. The ride is the thing, see, and the rhythm of the ride is important to the pleasure of the ride. You don't need to stop and smell the flowers when you are in an unending field of flowers — flowers made out of steel and concrete and flesh and rubber and light and all of them always coming toward you. I stopped a few times and snapped some nice pictures of the East River and lower Manhattan from the same perspective, but it didn't really do anything for me. Sorry Tom. The urge to take pictures was pretty strong though. How was I going to do it? Digital cameras are small enough to carry in pockets and I could just pull it out and snap the picture with one hand while keeping the bike in control with the other. Right? No. I needed something more-or-less hands free. Something that would offer safety and speed.

I decided I would try and film my commute with a camcorder. I borrowed one from my very trusting friend, Mimi, and with about a half a roll of ductape, managed to strap the camera to my helmet. There were multiple issues: shakey shakey video, a weight distribution problem that kept pulling my helmet into my eyes, and I looked fairly ridiculous. I returned the camcorder and engineered a different solution. By engineer, I mean I used bungee cords to strap my point-and-shoot to the handlebar of my bike as best I could. It worked, but I quickly determined it wasn't practical to rig the system every day. Finally, I settled on a mount and clamp system I found online at Campmor. It's called the ultraclamp.

You Go Girl: taken with Canon Powershot A560 on October 4, 2008

And then I took this picture — took it literally on the third or fourth trip with the new clamp. It's not perfect, a little washed out and just ever so out of focus, but when I saw it on my computer screen, I just stopped and stared. Up until that point, most of the photos has been pretty blah or completely out of focus. This one, however, it caught my attention. This one started the whole thing. Portraiture, storytelling, action, composition and poetry — all there and all born from happenstance. Like I said, there's always coming toward you — starlight, an 18-wheeler, your children, soundwaves, a whiff of orange, your next failure, the next war, word, or worry, a full beer from your bartender, your birthday, a poem, a friend. In this case, three BMXers, a fairly famous graffiti tag, and some of the lovelist bridge architecture anywhere, was headed my way. I'm just lucky I caught it.