It was when I lived in New York that I first started carrying a camera
with me full time, sometimes walking the streets pretending to be Garry
Winogrand, or someone. Of course, New
York explodes with quirky, unexpected, eye-catching details, and characters.
Even so I was slightly surprised to find this sign on a street in Hell’s Kitchen,
on a day in mid-May when the temperature was pushing 80 degrees F.
It reminded me of my favourite bit of New York street art, this
wonderful faux Ed Ruscha piece - not quite a mural, since it's not painted directly on the wall - at the Gaseteria at the corner of
Houston and Lafayette.
Obviously it didn’t always have a pile of snow in front of it, but
having taken the picture, that’s the way I always remember it. There’s still a
gas station on the site, but it’s no longer the Gaseteria, just a BP station, thriving as far as I could tell, with many yellow cabs using it, and the faux Ruscha has gone - perhaps even to a loving home. This is not surprising and it would have been absurd to "preserve" it in perpetuity, but still, I
sort of miss it.
My wife and I were walking down Fifth Avenue and we were discussing the
women and high heels in New York. She said
that she wasn’t seeing any New York women in high heels. This surprised me. When I lived there my impression was that the
streets were full of them, and then as if to prove my point, up ahead I saw a very
well-dressed woman wearing extremely high heels, a woman, it must be said, who
looked amazingly short, which was perhaps why she needed the heels.
And then, a split second later, I realized this was a “famous person” –
Nina Garcia – one of the judges of Project Runway (yes, yes, my wife sometimes
makes me watch it) and also Creative Director of Marie Claire Magazine,
whatever that might involve. Nina was struggling to find the right shiny black SUV
that was there to take her wherever she was going next. There were quite a few of them parked in the
vicinity, and the streets and traffic of New York were unrelenting. The first shiny black SUV she went to
wouldn’t let her in. She did some
yelling, both at the driver and into her cell phone. I reached for my camera.
I got a shot, though alas I couldn't get the shoes. I felt like Garry Winogrand, or maybe Ron Galella.
