On Time: Time and Time Again #flatiron
/When I was a student at #Indiana University I became captivated by photographic postcards of old New York -- they were my introduction to the early great photographers. I still have most of those cards and occasionally I'll pull them out. They still retain their magic and my favorites remain the same: images of The Flatiron Building. From the day I moved here, It is a structure that, more than any other, continues to engage my imagination. One of those images is from 1938 and was made by the great photographer Berenice Abbot, #bereniceabbot. She had been commissioned by President Roosevelt's Administration as part of its efforts during the Great Depression to document New York City. Amazingly, if you go to the spot she made the image from, remarkably little has changed. It's as though you are standing, sonar-like, in the midst of an echo.
The mystery of time, the fourth dimension, has always been one of the more intriguing aspects of photography for me -- in one sense, it's all about time. This quality only intensifies as so much of our current existence has an ever--increasing rapidity that is based, with death-march intensity, around "now, Now, NOW!" Nostalgia, however, is not the attraction. It's more based on three things: a quote I heard from John F. Kennedy that if those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it; the writings of Philip K. Dick; and explanations of different theories regarding time that I saw presented by Carl Sagan. Of course, I'm far from being a dynamic president, visionary writer or brilliant scientist, but one area I do like to explore from an artistic aspect is just that: time.
Time and Time Again - #flatironbuilding
