In the Field with a Field Camera

In the Field with a Field Camera

A photographer friend of
mine, Tadge Dryja, sent out the following email
yesterday morning:

“So just in case
any of y’all read the news and are like “hmm, collapse on 51st street
kills 4”, don’t worry, I’m cool. It was like, half a block away. It was
pretty wacky there for a while though this afternoon. Like, at first I thought
it was one of those awful noisy trucks, but then people started screaming, and
it was too loud for a truck. So I figured, “So they finally got the UN,
huh?” and went out and looked that way, but the UN was still standing,
then I turned around and was like “ohhh, right, the crane.”

Can’t say I’m *that*
surprised because they always seemed to be doing kind of a shoddy job at that
site and would like, swing things over the street and stuff. Anyway…

Most of the crane tower
is still there just looming over the street like this awesome monument to
hubris or something. I’ve been shooting it from my roof. I’ll just take all
these 4×5 photos of it and sell those to some magazine or something. If I was
REALLY smart, I’d figure out a way to work this in to my thesis project. “


Pretty classic for an
MFA student to be more worried about his thesis project than about the DISASTER that has
just happened in his backyard. But pretty amusing, too.

Saturday’s Midtown East
crane collapse is just one of many city accidents, and soon there will be
another. It’s just the nature of the beast. However, it was striking to me to
see 4×5 images of the scene. Although they’re not gory or extremely detailed
like some of the digital imagery that ran
in the Times, they’re quiet and so damn sharp.


I like this one best:

Thumbnail image for tadge_wide.jpg

I’m a big fan of a 4×5 or 8×10 used to document a disaster. Trying to catch a fleeting moment with a field
camera is pretty unintuitive, but damn ballsy. Most notable to me, perhaps, is
the work Joel Meyerowitz made at
the WTC site for the nine months following the incident that became the Phaidon
book Aftermath

About his use of large format, Meyerowitz
says:

“I
was taking pictures for everyone who didn’t have access to the site,” says
Meyerowitz in AFTERMATH, “so I decided to work with a large-format wooden
view camera. This camera was impossible to hide, but it enabled me to make
images of the fullest description, with a sense of deep space. I wanted to
communicate what it felt like to be in there as well as what it looked like: to
show the pile’s incredible intricacy and visceral power…. I could provide a
window for everyone else who wanted to be there, too–to help, or to grieve, or
simply to try to understand what had happened to our city.”

These images are simply staggering.

meyer4.jpg

meyer5.jpg

Thumbnail image for meyer6.jpg

meyer3.jpg

There is also one large format image in a similar milieu by Roe Ethridge that has been sitting in my brain for years. It’s unbelievable to see on the wall;
so rich and so red. It was hanging at the ICP during our holiday party in 2004 and I sipped champagne and stood in front of it for a long time. More on Roe
later, because Roe is amazing.

ethridge.jpg

Update: a loyal reader called my attention to Thomas Brodin’s work in a similar vein. Check out “Greenpoint 3“.

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There are 2 comments for this article
  1. Innis at 1:29 pm

    I’ll second that – Sternfeld is brilliant. See also Robert Polidori’s After The Flood – an exhaustive record of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

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