San Francisco food halt

It seems that you can find the same sort of bent lamp shades everywhere or was I just lucky ? At least some people are enjoying the menu list. A good omen in such a remote place. The forged iron grill behind the fading red curtains and the disparate tables are somehow reassuring. At last a place that reflects some humanity. Far from the branded restaurants that plague every city in the U.S. and even the world, looking the same everywhere, serving exactly the same industrial disgusting food, I was taken here by some friends who shared the same feeling about the unified world that we are now offered to live in. The tiny part of the ceiling visible in the picture shows those old molded tin ornaments that are still left in some traditional places. Let us hope these precious locations will not disappear too quickly, or be restored into flashy, trendy, cold restaurants for the dot.com well paid workers. 

San Francisco room

Hotel rooms can make you feel uncomfortable. The bent lampshade of an unused lighting device  and its shadow are quite disturbing. They give the impression something nasty is bound to happen. Behind the curtains, you can discern the windows of the opposite building, meaning that a voyeur might be posted there waiting for any weird event. The color arrangement of the room is probably designed to mask the many layers of stains that have occurred on the seats and carpet. The curved screen of an old television set seems to date the place from almost a Cold War area. There is even a white fan suggesting the air conditioning is defective. It looks like a crime scene after they removed the bodies. Have the scientific experts forgotten the two beer cans in front of the TV set ? Maybe that would give the ADN of the suspect ? We are in the North Beach area where some seedy night clubs illuminate Broadway. Am I in a 70's spy movie ? Well, it would be better to escape from this coming nightmare.  

San Francisco work

People work at night here. These two guys are bending on their computer screen right in the middle of a crossroad. I don't know what their job is, but it seems high tech. No more cars, no more people asking them what they are doing. It is late and seems an ideal quiet environment for an efficient intervention. This looks like a routine thing, not an emergency. Never seen something like this in France, where people work only 35 hours a week, night and week-end time being ruled out ! The only comment I will make is : it makes a nice photograph. It almost looks staged, as if I had asked these guys to install their colored cones there and the yellow protection grid before taking a seat and illuminate themselves with a specific lighting gear.

San Francisco traffic lights

Traffic light and no cars on the Embarcadero. The Bay Bridge bending towards Oakland through Yerba Buena Island. It all seems quiet. I don't remember what time it is. I am probably walking back from a dinner in Delancey street with an old friend. Actually the lights appear white when they should be red. Digital can't cope with such a contrast yet and the lights are overexposed beyond fixing on post. That's too bad. I could have tried a trick to color the white in red, but it would have lost authenticity. What I like here is that the lights seem more important than the bridge, but would have lost any interest without this huge metallic structure in the background. Now I am asking myself if I wanted the bridge or the lights, knowing perfectly well that it wouldn't have been worth a shot without them both.

San Francisco evening

Ellis street with a stormy sky reminds me of any downtown area in an american city. It probably changed since I took this picture, just a few years ago. So it is another distorsion of time, when you think this is yesterday and it is in fact five years ago. But here, there is no addition of an imaginative memory coming from other sources than my own eyes. Which makes it less dizzying. I remember the only thing that pushed me to press the shutter button at the time was the dark cloud at the end of the street. Rain was coming and I had better be ready for it or run back to my hotel on Bush street. I checked the place on Google Street and the big building reflecting the light on the right is a Hilton hotel, with a swimming pool on the roof. I couldn't have guessed that from the street. This ability to check places on this world map has totally changed the way you discover an unknown city. It kind of takes out surprise.

San Francisco doorstep

Real memory or blurred souvenirs … I thoroughly looked for this place on Lombard street. Everybody I was with wondered why I wasted time walking around the area to find this particular doorstep. They probably had forgotten Hitchcock's film, Vertigo. This is where Scotty-James Stewart brings back Madeleine-Kim Novak after she tried to drown herself at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. The place is real ! No set in one of Hollywood's movie lots ! The trees have grown since the shooting of the scene but you can almost see the lean figure of Stewart and the white coat of Novak when she drops a note in the mail box. Amazing ! Of course it looks different from what I had in my mind and the reason is the hors-champ, what was eliminated by the camera in the original scene. The hors-champ then became more important than what was originally filmed for the new impression I had at discovering the place. And it sort of dissipated the charm the movie had. Maybe one shouldn't try to lift the mystery of our memories. Now there is a permanent camera filming the intruders trying to drop a note in the mailbox…and there is a note lying on the pavement ! 

San Francisco vista

It looks more like a 19th century etching than a photograph. HDR ? Not even. That's how it was. No real whites, no full blacks. So it doesn't have that amazing Ansel Adams look. But at least I am in the same city he was brought up. Actually, I am in the perfect position for spying. But spying on what ? Maybe count the cars on the lower level of the Bay Bridge with a powerful enough looking glass. Here I feel far away in the past, the past that I built in my mind from reading and watching old movies. A past that probably has not existed. Travelling in some parts of the world is always an expectation of things we imagined. The only time you don't loose your illusions is when you land somewhere you never thought you would ever visit, a place you never saw any pictures of, never heard anything about. A small town in the center of the Massif Central in France, for exemple. I wish I could have had a clean vision of San Francisco when I first visited. Unfortunately, it was full of mental photographs of a totally false, imaginary place.   

San Francisco safety

Now I am safe. The situation is reversed. I am the one who can scan around and be aware of what is happening… from the inside. And I am a few thousand miles away, quietly eating some indian food at the corner of Fillmore and Clay in San Francisco. Thirty five years have elapsed. I skipped film. Digital has changed the look of the photographs, but not the content. I probably would have taken the same picture in 1981, had I been here. But I wonder if the food had the same taste. Although this city was the set to many Film Noir, it seems less threatening, the pace is slower. I wonder how it was in the 50's… For a French person, California is a must go place. It seems to be full of expectations and I wonder if this is all justified. Not that I am trying to deconstruct a myth… I am just curious, and it appears that I got rid of my escort of threatening agents.

New York paranoia

I don't know how I did manage to get a snap of this guy. I had the impression to be followed by an FBI agent… Except I didn't see any device going to his ear. So that is probably what reassured me. After all, if you are being tailed, you might as well be bold, just like in a movie. But wait, there is another guy checking the scene beyond the shop window, at the far right. I am really being trapped ! And the models, behind the window, they deliberately avoid looking at me. What have I done ? Nothing I guess, I am just a voyeur. And people don't like that anywhere in the world. There is another warning sign of my state of mind : the scene is almost monochromatic. No primary colors. I feel like in a vision tunnel and I am losing my sense of perception. Soon I will be deaf as well. This situation is so worrying that I can't hear anything properly anyway. In this state of mind, if I turn back and cross the road in a hurry, I won't hear the cars and I might be run over. That's what these people have planned, I am sure. Wait. That was over three decades ago. These so called agents are now well in their eighties. I can escape, they won't be able to follow. But, hey, I am not that young any more either. It is time to leave New York in a rush.

New York street

This is street photography by a shy guy. I didn't even dare take a picture of people facing me. And the figure seems too far away. It was a long time ago. Maybe I would be more assured today. But I would still take such a photograph. I like the loneliness it conveys. The light on the pavement degrades slowly to the left and there are those two round things symetrically positioned behind the man with the beige suit. Where is he looking, I couldn't tell. It seems totally uninteresting. And you have the homeless man sitting on the bottom left, drinking some beer with a straw. Today, I wouldn't get such a picture because there are very few people left wearing beige suits and a hat. Hats seems to have disappeared from men's head, when it was so common in New York years ago. Suits are now dark, but mainly reserved for Wall Street workers. And the man has a newspaper rolled in this hands. These are also fading away. Today you are bent on your smartphone to check the news. And it is not yesterday's news. Also, it is hard to see a homeless in the streets of New York nowadays. They have been hidden. Apparently they are now relegated in the abandoned underground tunnels of the city…

New York car

I cannot remember where this was. Again, about 35 years have elapsed since then. It sure is not taken from the top of the old World Trade Center. I would have needed a big telephoto lens  to get this crop from a quarter of a mile high. These kinds of cars are fading from the American scene. They were probably one of the first things that stroke a European traveller arriving in New York at the time. Environment control and fashion have made these big sedans obsolete. This one seems to have a dent on the bonnet. Did someone drop something from where I was standing ? Not me, not my camera or there would be no picture. And this looks like a dead end, a "cul de sac" as they say… Funny, I am expecting any moment a doorman helping somebody coming out of the building to get into the big car. I must mix this up with one of the many movie sequences stuck in my head. But which movie ? Who was starring ? What is certain is that the chauffeur is going to initiate a delicate maneuver in order to go somewhere.

New York Twins

I cannot help putting this photograph, although I would not have chosen it had the towers still been there. The use of Ektachrome film gives a contrast and a texture that has disappeared on today's images. It is not as sharp and detailed as digital imaging, the dynamic range is more compressed naturally. Here again, I can determine that it was indeed late morning. Two things strike me there : the beautiful architectural detailing of the tower with these kind of interwoven ogival grids for the windows. It is richer than plain reflecting tainted glass so common on more recent buildings. And there is another thing that I can see along the shores of the Hudson river : the Lakawana ferry station in its green copper art deco coating. I used to take the ferry whenever I came to New York since I often stayed in New Jersey. I much preferred the ferry to the train, although it was slower. Boarding in Hoboken, the boat arrived at the foot of the Twin Towers and it was always a magic moment. Due to my size, the edge of the tower is exactly at the same level as the horizon line. It disturbs the composition and I would probably have tried to improve on that, if I had thought this shot was anything other than a testimony of my presence there, like too many tourist shots. And I cannot even say that I will do it better next time. 

New York deleted

Here is a roof top that does not exist anymore. I recently found this picture among some others and it did kind of hurt. This was the roof of the World Trade Center before 9/11. This was definitely a windless day and it must have been late morning according to the position of the shadows. The light is amazingly unreal and it looks like a science fiction movie set, apart from the aloofness of the people which gives the feeling of a relaxed moment, totally the opposite of the strange structures that suggest a threatening situation. I do not remember which lens I had put on the Nikon. It could well be a 50 mm, as I can't see any distorsion on the edge of the frame. What disturbs me most is of course the fact that nobody will ever see such a scene anymore. I know, it is the essence of photography to catch a brief slice of time forever and that is what makes every photograph so mysterious, but here, the feeling is enhanced by the fact that it looks like it was taken yesterday but it was 35 years ago. And in the meantime a horrendous event wiped the place out…

New York roof

In this great hotel, there was a roof terrasse. I went there early one morning with my wife and we happened to shoot a picture in the same direction, except they were entirely different. The only proof of our presence there is our embedded shadows on the brick wall. I know this is nothing very original but at the time, it made me think of the permanent shadows of human beings on the walls of destroyed buildings in Hiroshima, photographs that I always had kept in my brain since I first saw them. It is strange because I remember that this escape on the roof was a happy moment. The superposition of memories at the time one takes a picture is a weird sensation. Happily enough this was not a "déjà vu" situation where one has the feeling of having lived the exact same event in the past. Anyway, our shadows are permanently recorded on this photograph and they are positioned just as they should… 

New York hotel window

I thought I was going to move somewhere else in the world after this hotel room picture. But instead, I am moving back in time. This is the window of a room in the old Gramercy Park Hotel. And that was in the early 1980's… I was fascinated by the ray of sun on the curtain. It looked solid as if I could touch it, but kept moving to soon disappear as our planet Earth changed position. The Ektachrome film was really slow, only ISO 64, and I guess I must have been using a 50mm lens on my Nikon F2. The texture of the film gives an entirely different feeling to the picture compared to a modern digital camera. Of course this could have been anywhere in the world. One can only guess what is behind those venetian blinds. The only thing that gives an idea that we might be in an american city are the handles on the upwards sliding window. This is definitely not a French window ! But for the rest, are we in New York, is it even a hotel room ? It is just the weight of my own memories that surround this two dimensional image that makes me tell you we are indeed on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Gramercy Park North.

New York mess

Here you can see the ordinary hotel room of a bunch of workers. Video, photography, are team work and you constantly move around. Most  would see these jobs as glamorous dreams. This is more often the reality. Several guys stuck in a room for a few days, most of the time dead tired when they get back there. So maybe the previous shot was what I saw through these windows… Actually we were lucky to have an angle room with two windows looking in the streets. Sometimes you are assigned a place with only one window giving into some kind of a pit. No light, no air, some brick wall in front of you. It can be depressing. In these situations, arriving from Europe, the jet lag keeps you from sleeping and you spend half the night in front of your laptop screen, trying to communicate with the rest of your life. But after all you are far away, in an exciting place ! Let's go down and grab a burger.

New York essence

Inescapable image for a foreigner coming to the big city. The title is a bit corny : what kind of essence is that ? Well, the Empire State Building is hidden behind another high tower ! It is truncated, mainly because I wanted to keep parallel lines… also because it is so huge. And the light is probably unique and therefore an essential character of New York. Nowhere else will you find such a sharp light in an urban landscape. Where is the pollution ? Everything is so detailed that it looks more like an illustration than reality. Even this untreated picture looks fake. But it has not been retouched in any way. This is what you can see from the window of a sixteenth floor room. In Paris, the light is always soft, even on a sunny day after the rain. Most of the time it is almost creamy. Nowadays, it is very often yellowish due to the pollution. But here, in this enormously noisy maze of narrow streets where pollution should be visible, it almost looks too clear. As if One had at last cleaned one's glasses.

New York accumulation

This is a wide angle chaos. It is dark, yet there is enough depth of field to have everything in focus. Well, this is the impression that I thought it would give. The cars are waiting in their slots, like a distributing machine for chocolate bars or soda cans. The sky looks threatening and the foreground car seems to have rolled over my feet. I am definitely not in a smooth environment. Things give me the feeling to have been thrown in a kind of garbage lot. And I might be myself sucked by this big movement. Next time I will try to be more careful. The framing was tempting though, and I know I will only be guided by my lust of a weird photograph depicting an ordinary scene. 

New York night parking

Sometimes you are waiting for something and your attention gets caught by an inward brain connection. You are suddenly somewhere else, although physically stuck on a parking lot with no one to speak to. This time I had the impression to be in the middle of some one else's photograph. This is difficult to explicitly describe. Was I another photographer, shooting a picture I would not have taken myself, or was I unconsciously influenced by an unknown, maybe not even existing photographer ? Although I was using a digital camera, I saw myself under the dark cloth of a large 8 x 10 wooden device, thinking about a future dye transfer print. And I have never used this kind of equipment for such types of pictures. So I was at the same time another person and immersed in that person's work ! In fact I had just been attracted by the reflection of the light on the shiny bodies of the parked cars. But in my brain, many other things had been happening…

New York corridor

Tunnel vision. That's the impression I had with the previous picture. That's what I have now, wandering along the endless corridors of a huge hotel building. Probably a few thousand similar rooms… guaranteed anonymity but at the same time I feel alone and a little frightened. What might be happening behind these doors ? Couples arguing, violence ? Maybe murder or rough sex. Maybe there is a tired woman mesmerized by the television screen, drinking from the mini-bar. Or two guys discussing the next day's strategy at their business meeting. Anything can happen there, but in such an environment it can only be drab, depressing. The only escape would be to jump out of the window, whose curtains are animated by the outside breeze. Somehow, it is tempting. At least it looks like the only issue. I want to see the view, the reassuring  compulsive act of a photographer.