Vertical photograph of a building entrance in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. This building has the corner cut out at a 45° angle, an architectural feature common in Williamsburg and Bushwick. You can see another example of this kind of building if you scroll down in my feed. Interestingly, if you look on Street View you can see that the corner entrance was closed off with a wall, so that it was squared off, but then a year later the wall was removed and it’s back to its original appearance. This site was the location of a beloved local coffee shop, but at this point it has been closed for about six months, after the greedy landlord wanted to double the business’s rent. As such, the location is covered in graffiti and wheatpaste posters, and for some reason there is a bright orange traffic cone sitting out front. A bar would open at this location a little later, but with 2020 being the absolute worst time to open a bar since 1920, it quickly went out of business, and has been sitting empty ever since. The landlord has lost far more money than he would have if he had kept the original business owner in place. You would think that the landlord would take this opportunity to reconsider his greed, but no. Once greed has infected an individual, the only response the person is capable of is to double down.

Bushwick, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

😮

Closely-cropped photograph of the front of a rowhouse in the Bushwick, neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is close to the ground, underneath the first-story window, so that the bottom half of the frame is the foundation, and the top half is blue vinyl siding. The foundation is made of bricks, painted white, but the paint has been peeling off, so you can see the bright red bricks underneath. There are basement windows blocked off with metal plates, which are also covered with peeling paint, and you can see the rusty metal underneath. The blue vinyl is covered in white graffiti tags, and you can see the shadow of the front stoop railing cast in diagonal and vertical lines across the frame. This photo is part of my Vintage Vinyl project, which is sitting in a box waiting for me to sequence and edit. In fact, I’ve tried editing this project four or five times already, only to throw everything back into the pile and start over. It just isn’t gelling for me. This one photo is a good distillation of the whole project, combining the formal composition of the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, contrasting it with the chaos of the graffiti, peeling paint, and rust.

Bushwick, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Tightly-cropped photograph of a Greek Revival limestone building in Park Slope, Brooklyn. On the left is a stoop leading up to the main entrance, which interestingly, is made of brownstone, while the rest of the building is limestone. On the right, there is some wrought-iron fencing in the foreground, which is topped by tasteful curved iron fleurets, which adds a bit of visual interest compared to the plain Doric columns behind the fencing. Obviously, Ionic columns, which are also topped with fleurets, would have been a better match for this fence.

Park Slope, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

I keep thinking about Edgar Bronfman Jr., the failson heir to Seagram who ended up destroying the 150-year-old business when he tried buying and running Universal Pictures.

Close-up photograph of the front façade of a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. This is the curved front bay of the building. The bay has two windows, with an air conditioner sticking out of one of the windows, with curved wrought-iron bars to protect the window and the AC unit. The sunlight hits the curved surface at an acute angle, creating a chiaroscuro effect. The metal bars project an elaborate curved shadow along the front of the building. Below the window is a large ceramic planter, with dead plants in it, as this photo was taken in February.

Park Slope, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of a baby blue colored 1964 Ford Falcon, parked along Van Brundt Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In the background behind the classic automobile is a wall covered in street art, depicting a psychedelic scene of plants and animals and eyeballs and disembodied hearts at night in fluorescent colors. Behind the wall is typical industrial Red Hook, with a backhoe sticking up over the wall.

Red Hook, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of the underside of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, as it passes over the neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn. This photograph is an illustration of the boundless hubris of Robert Moses, as this behemoth of a viaduct passes through what was once a vibrant residential neighborhood, but is now a monument to a car culture that rains pollution down on the people on the ground below. The composition of this photo is meant to evoke Futurism, the fascist art movement, but instead of leading us to a glorious future of perfect machines, it shows the hollowness of that dream, as the structure is old, dirty, and is nearing the end of its useful lifespan. Two blocks from my apartment, another section of the BQE is literally on the verge of collapse. At any time the cantilever could become detached, and fall and lead to the death of dozens, if not hundreds of people, and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage. Yet redevelopment has been stalled for decades. The people of the city need to come to realization that automobiles in the big city was a terrible mistake, and all these highways just need to be torn down permanently.

Red Hook, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Close-up photograph of a shop window in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. The shop is closed; you can see that from the “CLOSED” sign hanging in the window. This shop has been closed for a long, long time. The windows are clouded over, and there is a towel and a couple of pieces of paper in the window. One of the papers is a piece of junk mail from the Century 21 real estate franchise, which hasn’t been an active business in the area for a couple of decades. The other piece of paper is covered with layers and layers of water stains which turns out to make a fascinating pattern, contributing heavily to the evocative wabi-sabi mood of the photograph. The window frame itself is made of old, rotten wood, and one might deduce from the towel and the water stains that the window is quite leaky. The window sill is a dented piece of sheet metal haphazardly nailed to the bottom of the window; again, probably, another feeble attempt to mitigate water damage. This is one of the most beautiful photographs I have ever taken, out of the tens of thousands of exposures I have made over my adult life.

Carroll Gardens, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of a storefront on the ground floor of brownstone in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. This storefront has been repurposed into an architect’s office, which we can discern by the word ARCHITECTS that has been painted on the front window. No name of the firm, just architects. The scene is bathed in sunlight, but the reflection of the sky in the window is gloomy and foreboding. Appropriate, since this photo was taken a few weeks before the COVID lockdown.

Carroll Gardens, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

I remember talking to a guy who said he and his friends wore bright red to Frank Rizzo’s funeral, and popped a champagne bottle when he was lowered into the ground.

Eobard was right. Err, will be right. Had once will have been right.

Photograph of the front of a Chinese take-out restaurant in the Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The restaurant is closed, as this was taken at 11am, and the front is closed off with two drab grey rolling metal gates. In front of the gates hangs a bright red Chinese lantern. In between the two gates is a pamphlet dispenser with a stack of take-out menus, which have faded in the sun and shriveled in the rain.

Cobble Hill, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of the façade of a brick building in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is one of the buildings in the Cobble Hill Towers complex, which was built in 1879 as cheap housing for workers, but is now one of the most desirable places to live in New York City. Or at least it would be if it weren’t also next to the trench that Robert Moses dug for the BQE. Which mostly sucks, but it also ensures that these buildings get spectacular light in the early afternoon, as when this photo was taken. I find myself going back to this site to take photos quite often.

Cobble Hill, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

*2020

*2020

Photograph of a “temporary” plywood construction wall in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. Unlike most of these fences, which are painted a mandated hunter green, this has one panel painted a bright lime green, the other a dark grey. There is a shadow cast on the plywood, from a corner walk/don’t walk sign. There is a circular window cut out of the fence, and a local street artist has drawn a human figure around the window, with the circle as the head, making the figure look like an astronaut. The astronaut has words written on its chest: “I AM FROM THE FUTURE”, and a word balloon saying “IT WILL GET BETTER FOR AWHILE”. This photo was taken a couple of weeks before the COVID lockdown began. Next to this construction site is a nursing home, where over fifty people lost their lives in the early weeks of the pandemic. This site is a brownstone whose reconstruction has been stalled for a very long time. For over twenty years, the site has closed off with scaffolding and fencing. It’s still there is 2026, but the graffiti has long since been painted over. I still feel a lingering sense of resentment towards the li’l lying time traveler: I’m still waiting for things to get better.

Cobble Hill, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of the side entrance to a home in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn. The house is clad in off-white vinyl siding, and the sunlight creates an interesting pattern of shadows on the horizontal slats. The doorway has a screen door, and is covered with an aluminum awning, which also has a pattern of horizontal slats which are the exact same shade of off-white, but with a little bit of blue trim. There is also a window, which has venetian blinds, also off white, whose narrow horizontal pattern breaks up the wider horizontal pattern of the siding. To keep the photograph from being entirely a monotonous assault of off-white horizontal lines, there is a wooden bench underneath the window. In the foreground is a short black chainlink fence, whose diamond pattern melds into the rest of the abstract patterns of the photograph.

Kensington, 2026 #Brooklyn #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of the side of a residential building in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn. The brick foundation of the building is painted a shade of olive-green, while the rest of the building above is clad in wooden shingles, painted a shade of mint-green. Appropriate, since this home is located on Greenwood Avenue. What makes the street name even more appropriate, is the homeowners obvious love of gardening. The side of the home is covered in vines, although the vines are bare, since this photo was taken in February. In front of the vines are stems covered in thorns, which are from rose bushes. This site will turn into a lush green oasis in the spring and summer. Also leaning against the building is a trellis for vines to grow on. Oddly, even though this scene has vines snaking through it everywhere, there are no vines growing on the trellis; they’re all attached to the building behind the it. The trellis seems to be undergoing some sort of existential crisis.

Windsor Terrace, 2026 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

The Las Vegas Divorcees.

Another photograph of the front façade of a home in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. This home is clad in Formstone, which is stucco shaped to look like brick. Whoever applied the Formstone on this building went a little wild, making it a surface covered with rectangular faux bricks of all shapes and sizes, creating an abstract pattern which resembles a Mondrian painting, if Piet Mondrian had worked in earth-tones instead of primary colors. It pushes the presumption of brickness to its limit; if this building had been built with actual bricks of these shapes, it obviously would have quickly collapsed. The front window, which has a venetian blind in the background, has a 2000s-vintage webcam hanging in it, with a daisy chain of USB cables stringing back to its source. It also has a small religious tchotchke of fake stained glass, depicting a scene of a woman praying to an angel. Perhaps she is Jeanne d'Arc? It’s hard to tell, as the resolution of 35mm film makes it difficult to examine the item closely.

Sunset Park, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of the front stoop of a house in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building is clad in vinyl siding, colored mint green. The doorway is covered with an aluminum awning, colored dark olive green. And the door is wooden, with some tasteful circular patterns carved into it, but it’s painted a bright blue. In short, this is one of the most godawful palettes of clashing colors I have ever encountered in my 10+ years of documenting the vernacular architecture of New York City. It’s made even worse because you can see glimpses of the building next door—which has yellow bricks and red ceramic roof tiles, which makes this building feel even more out of place. Hooray for this building! I would readily take a thousand of these buildings in bold clashing colors than I would the soulless monochromatic architecture that is constantly inflicted upon us, that slowly sucks the life out of all of us.

Sunset Park, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of the front façade and stoop of a building in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The bricks of the building a dull yellow-white, and the window sills, the stoop, and the columns flanking the doorway are a dull powder blue. The sunlight shining on the building from an acute angle gives the building a quiet, ghostly appearance, as if the building wants to fade into the background and disappear entirely. There are DOB construction permits in the window, indicating that one of more of the apartments inside are undergoing renovation. In front of the building, next to the stoop is a bathtub resting on its side, seemingly being disposed of as part of said renovation. We can’t see if the tub had clawfeet or not; if it did, it would likely have gotten snatched up by some entrepreneur who could have restored it and sold it at a huge profit. In front of the bathtub is a blue bicycle, chained to the stoop.

Sunset Park, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of the front of a store in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building is clad in wooden clapboard (a rarity in NYC), painted red-orange, with two doorways painted hunter green.

Sunset Park, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of the front façade of a rowhouse in the South Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building is clad in vinyl siding that has been painted teal; a daring color choice. The window frame are a crisp white, and the brickwork of the foundation and the stoop are painted a bright orange-red. The mailbox, too, is white, and the door is a silvery aluminum, with vertical glass slats. In the window is a venetian blind, which makes the home look perpetually stuck in the year 1962.

South Slope, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Somebody has been uploading a shit-ton of comics zines to the Internet Archive lately.

Photograph of a tall corrugated metal fence along a sidewalk in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. On the sidewalk in front of the fence, slightly off-center (because I have the Rule of Thirds embedded in my brain), is a red wooden chair. Projected onto the fence is the shadow of a streetlight, with several signs attached. Behind the fence is some sort of tent-like industrial structure. The fence is new and clean and shiny, but also a neutral color, so the red chair and a glimpse of blue sky in the background break up the monotony.

Sunset Park, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400