Tom Scola

@heyscola.bsky.social

416 Followers 256 Following

Photographer, Brooklyn Buffista

Photograph of a coin-operated car vacuum at a gas station in Ridgewood, Queens. The vacuum cleaner itself is a stainless steel cylinder, sitting on a concrete pedestal, and for some reason is wearing a jaunty green cap, making the contraption look quite dapper. There is a hook at the top that says HANG HOSE HERE, but of course the hose was left lying on the ground. Behind the vacuum are two shipping containers, stacked on top of each other, and colored a dull brown and pink. Each is covered in graffiti tags, as all shipping containers left in urban industrial areas inevitably are. Along with the hose there is a bit of trash lying on the ground, and a weed grows out of a seam in the concrete sidewalk.
Photograph of the front façade of a bodega in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. The bodega’s wall is covered in bright red paneling, but most of the walls and windows are covered in advertisements for beer and cider. You can see a little bit inside of the bodega, where there are cardboard boxes of beer, and also, weirdly, a Santa figure, even though this photograph was taken in August. Above the window is the remnants of a tattered cloth awning. This is a quite sad place, and I can assure you that the interior of the bodega is even more disgusting than the exterior. Yet the bright red color ultimately rescues the photograph from being completely dreary and disheartening.
Photograph of a closed storefront in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. The entire front of the store is closed off by rolling gates. This would normally make the scene look dystopian and depressing, but here, the gates are painted in strips of jaunty colors! I see orange, blue, pink, yellow, and teal. A big win against the conspiracy to remove color everywhere. This is an unusual photograph from me in that it is cropped. I normally try to compose my shots in-camera as much as possible. Composing in-camera and not cropping is one of the main practices that improved my photography immensely. But here, I had to lop off the right part of the frame, changing the aspect ration from the normal 35mm 2:3 to 5:7. This improved the compositional harmony of the frame immensely. The right part of the frame was just dead space that added nothing to the photo. I could have just walked closer to the subject and composed the building tighter, but that would have involved me standing in the middle of Smith Street while taking the picture, which would have been a stupid thing to do. So I had to crop in post instead. So, anyway, if you want to get better at photography, get into the habit of composing your photos in-camera, and not cropping in post. It will improve your ability to look for photography subjects in the field, and the end product will be better. Pre-visualization, they call it, although I think that’s a stupid term. But also, crop when you gotta crop.
Black and white photograph of a window to a home of a brick building in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The photograph is absolutely infested with wabi-sabi: The bricks are old and uneven since the building has settled since it was originally built in 1843. At one point in this building’s long history the façade was painted, but it has long since faded away, leaving only a few flakes of paint here and there. There is a vine crawling up the side of the window, giving what would be an incredibly boring photograph the perfect amount of visual flair. The window is covered with iron bars and is closed off with a sheer white curtain. If you look closely, there is a small drawing of a rainbow by a child hanging in the window, the visual impact of which is completely lost, since this is a black and white photo.
Black and white photograph of the front façade of a house in Brooklyn Heights. This historic house, built in 1831, is clad in wooden clapboards. The noontime sun shines down on the clapboards, enhancing their contrast. A bush on the bottom right of the frame breaks up on monotony of the horizontal lines.
Black and white photograph of the side of an apartment building in Brooklyn Heights. At the bottom left of the frame is a wrought iron fence, with a bicycle attached to it with a u-lock. Above the frame is an unseen fire escape, whose shadow casts a lattice-like pattern across the frame. Even though this photo was taken midday in the middle of summer, I have the photo graded pretty dark, as the frame is mostly in shadow, with some sections of blown-out direct sunlight.
Photograph of a planter on a window sill of a brownstone in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of a diptych. The sun hits the scene at an acute angle, giving it an extremely dramatic appearance. The bed of the planter is covered in green leaves, while two small bright red flowers shoot upwards. The Internet tells me the plant is some kind of germanium hybrid. Of the two photos in the diptych, I much prefer this one, although the Internet disagrees with me.
Photograph of the front façade of a commercial/industrial building in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building has a big rolling gate for trucks to enter, with the words NO PARKING stenciled onto it. Looking at this site on Street View, the entrance also has a curb cut which is painted bright yellow, and there is a bright orange traffic cone out front with another NO PARKING sign attached to it, and of course, a car parked right there. Next to the truck entrance is a doorway for humans. It was once painted a pleasing color of pumpkin-orange, but the paint has started to flake off, the door is weathered and dented, and has started to rust. To the right of the frame, the building’s cinder blocks are painted in a mosaic of pastel colors, which is the kind of vernacular architecture shit that I LIVE for.
Photograph of the front façade of a home in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is a former 19th century carriage house that has been converted into a residence. The large swinging doors that were used to park a rich person’s horse and carriage is no longer functional, and the present owner has decorated it with plants. This building is charming as fuck, but it’s also a waste of space, since this lot could fit apartments for many people, instead of the pied-à-terre for one family. Since the block it is on is landmarked, it can never be torn down. Kodak had recently re-introduced Ektachrome in 2019, and I got my hands on some here in 2020. I liked the results, but the extra expense wasn’t worth it to me. Plus, my piece of shit scanner and software had a surprisingly difficult time with this. Just reproduce exactly what appears on the slide, how difficult can that be? I had to tweak the hell out of these scans to get decent results, and a bunch of frames were wasted because I couldn’t fix them in post, even though everything was correctly exposed.
Photograph of the front stoop of what was once an industrial building in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. Everything is quite Spartan in appearance. The stairs are made from diamond-pattern steel plates. The doors are a bland grey metal. There is a column next to the doors, again painted a dull grey. There is a warning sign attached to the column warning about the building’s freight elevator. In spite of everything being drab and functional, this is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. I haven’t looked it up, but I don’t doubt that apartments worth tens of millions of dollars sit above this inauspicious entrance.
Vertical photograph of a bright red wall in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. This is really, really, red. I overexposed the UltraMax by two stops to bring out the red even more in the bright sunshine. This is way more red than your monitor can handle. On the sidewalk in front of the wall is a metal barrier, with vertical bars, and above, out of frame, is a fire escape, whose shadow projects horizontal bars across the top half of the frame. Since 2020, this wall has been painted black, part of the conspiracy to remove color from all our lives.
Current Air Quality AQI 155 Unhealthy Brooklyn, NY 1 PM EDT JUL 15, 2026
A vertical photograph of a fenced-off lot in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Sitting on the sidewalk in front of the fence is one of those free newspaper dispensers you see all over the city. This one has been absconded, painted red and black, and has been repurposed as a Little Free Library. However, it looks like the LFL has failed at its new purpose, and now sits empty and abandoned, next to a small pile of trash.
Black and white photograph of the interior of a NYC subway car. This is an R62 subway car, built c. 1984. Forty-two years old, and going strong; due to be replaced in the next 5–10 years. The interior is mostly stainless steel; perfect for the black and white rendering. On the wall is a posting in the NYC Subway Poetry in Motion Series: Faithful Forest: an excerpt by Alberto Rios b. 1952 The leaves liked the wind, and went with it. The trees grew more leaves, but wind took them all. And then the bare trees were *branches*, which in their frenzy Made people think of so many ideas— Branches were lines on the paper of sky, Drawing shapes on the shifting clouds Until everyone agreed that they saw horses.
Black and white photograph of an old wooden building in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. This is purported to be one of the oldest buildings in Brooklyn, built some time between 1790 and 1826. However, I googled this address, and dug up a document filed with the Landmarks Preservation Committee, which goes into a much deeper history of the building. This particular section of the building was (re-)constructed in 1938. This was during the peak of the Colonialist Revival movement. So this is kind of a Disneyland representation of what people in the 1930s thought 18th Century buildings were supposed to look like. I’m giving those wooden shutters the side-eye. They’re completely non-functional, and they seem pretty kitschy to me.
Photograph of the front stoop of a building in Chinatown, Manhattan. This place is technically Little Italy, but that really isn’t a neighborhood any more, and only exists as a tourist destination. Indeed, this façade is now covered in awning, and is now an establishment that sells tchotchkes to tourists. At this time, however, the door and the rest of the building was covered in layers of red paint to cover up the graffiti, resulting in splotches of different shades of red. Some time between 2021 and 2022 the red door was replaced by one with large glass window panes, which is less likely to attract graffiti.
Photograph of some translucent plastic awning outside of a bodega in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The awning is quite dramatically lit from behind by the sun, rendering the colors of all the graffiti that is spraypainted on the awning quite spectacularly, including the helpful words WEAR A MASK, as this photo was taken during the height of the lockdown in 2020. If you zoom in, there is another flyer wheatpasted onto the awning that says “Think about the old folks please!” Above the awning is an Orwellian-looking security camera aimed down on the sidewalk.
Photograph of an empty store front in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The sign reads SAM’S KNITWEAR. The front window is covered in paper, and is closed off by a set of scissor gates. The front door has its own rolling gate housing, which is painted orange. Everything is old and dented and fading. All this signage and gating would be ripped down over the next few years, and is now a boutique that sells phenomenally ugly clothing to vapid Dimes Square millennials. It will go out of business in the next couple of years, as all of these NYC scenes inevitably disintegrate, and then thirty years from now, people will look at the faded BIG BUD PRESS signage and empty storefront and wonder what that was all about.
Photograph of a planter next to a set of doors outside of a building in Brooklyn Heights. The sun strikes the scene at a dramatic angle, bathing the colorful flowers in the planter in bright light. It appears the building was once a commercial building; the planter sits on what seems to be a loading dock. The dock is covered in diamond-plate metal, and it is raised off of the ground for easy loading and unloading. But this building is no longer an industrial site, it has long since been carved up into apartments, valued at something in between $2 million and $6 million each. But this does give hints to a time when this neighborhood had temporarily de-gentrified in the early 20th Century, before it re-gentrified starting in the 1970s to the present. In 1926, exactly one block from this site, noted racist H.P. Lovecraft lived in a cheap boarding house. He absolutely *hated* the neighborhood, especially its immigrant population, inspiring to write the short story _The Horror at Red Hook_.
Vertical photograph of a stoop along the side of a brownstone in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The doorway is on the second floor of the building, but the stairs aren’t visible in the photo; they’re off to the right, out of frame. The stoop itself is made of brownstone, has a prominent but non-functional arch carved into it, and is stained green from the lichen that grows in its porous surface. The top of the stoop is closed off by some wrought iron railing, so that you don’t step out of the door and then fall five feet onto the sidewalk — that would hurt. Next to the door is a large and stylish vase, with some sort of grass growing out of it. The bottom of the stoop has some railing off to the left, providing some visual harmony with the railing above.
Somewhat close-up photograph of the side of a building in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building is clad corrugated metal, which is covered in layers and layers of graffiti. All that spraypaint must not have been good for the galvanic coating of the metal, for now it is seriously rusted, all the way through in places, which is then patched with other sheets of corrugated metal. This patchwork of rusted metal had been going on for decades, making this one of the most visually interesting and photogenic buildings in the area, until finally, the siding was completely replaced earlier this year. I’m sad to see it go.
Photograph of a metal box outside of a bodega in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. The box is red and rusted, and looks like it is starting to disintegrate. It is covered in stickers, most prominent is an ad for chewing tobacco products, with a prominent warning that using that shit can cause mouth cancer. Behind the box is the store window, showing shelves filled with products for sale. This is the third in my Metal Boxes Outside of Bodegas series, which I took in quick succession in 2020. In the past six years, I’ve taken lots more pictures of boxes, but almost all of them suck. I’ve only added two more to the series since then. It’s kind of humbling to see how much serendipity plays a part in my photography, and how difficult it is to make photos happen.
Photograph of a concrete planter along a side street in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. The planter is in sad shape. The front of the planter is covered in blue splotches, which covers up the graffiti underneath. I mean, seriously, if the graffiti is that bad, then just go ahead and paint the whole surface a uniform color. The splotches just end up making it worse. Surrounding the back of the planter are some railroad ties, which have reached the end of their useful lives, and have started to rot. A similar story can be told about the wooden fencing behind the planter. It, too, is starting to rot, no doubt being slowly eaten away by the ivy that covers it. Out of the planter, however, grows a single deep pink tulip, at peak bloom, adding a slight hint of hope and renewal amid this scene of decay.
Photograph of the side of a building with retail space on the first floor. At one point, this building contained a florist shop, because you can see that the shop window has been covered over with plywood, which has the word FLORIST and a lovely picture of some flowers painted on it. To the right of the window is a wrought iron fence, which at one point had a vehicle or other heavy object strike it because it is all curved and gnarly. The fence has a gate with closed off with a chain and padlock, which seems kind of pointless to me, since it does not look very difficult to step over the fence, or even just knock the fence over and put it out of its misery. Above to the right a fire escape is mounted onto the building, and you can see its shadow projecting a lattice pattern on the wall below it.
Photograph of a corrugated metal fence surrounding an industrial site in the Vinegar Hill enclave of Brooklyn. The fencing is painted gray, and has an imposing amount of razor wire strewn along the top. To the right, is a tall rolling fence to allow trucks into the yard, and there is a doorway cut out of the fence. The doorway has a decal of an American flag carefully stuck on it, and there is another American flag on a pole behind the fence.
Photograph of the front of a bar in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. This bar was Floyd’s, which closed last year after about 25 years in business. This photo was taken during the lockdown, when the bar was closed for several months. It eventually reopened, but New York had a dumb law that only bars that served food could reopen, so you had to order a slice of reheated frozen pizza with your beer, which you consumed at the tables they set up on the sidewalk. The space has now been sitting empty for over a year, far longer than it was shut down during the lockdown.
Photograph of the front façade and window of a residential building in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The façade is made of bricks, painted yellow-orange, although the paint has chipped off in some places. The image is punctuated by cage imagery: Above the window is a fire escape, which is not visible in the frame, however, the grid-like shadow of the fire escape and its ladder is cast below it. At the bottom of the frame is a cast-iron fence, which casts its own fleuret-capped grid across the frame. And the window has a metal pantograph shutter behind it, which also has a grid pattern. As this photo was taken a couple of weeks into the lockdown, the allusions to cages makes the photo seem a little more profound, at least to me.
The next photo in my aborted Metal Boxes Outside of Bodegas series. This is a photo of a metal box outside of a bodega in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The box has a slanted cover, and is covered in red and green spraypaint. The sun hits the box at an advantageous angle, with just the right amount of light and shadow. One problem I’ve been having with this series is that most of the time when I come across one of these boxes, the light is terrible. The other problem is that the boxes are disappearing. This box was removed in 2022.
Photograph of a metal box outside of a bodega in Brooklyn Heights. I have a frustrating relationship with metal boxes outside of bodegas. I took this photo, which is *awesome*, and then another *awesome* photo of a metal box outside of a bodega on the same roll of film, which will be the next photo I post in a couple of days. And then on the very next roll of film, I took yet another *awesome* picture of a metal box outside of a bodega, which I will also post soon, and I said to myself, oh hey, I guess I’m working on a series of photos of metal boxes outside of bodegas now. And then, *nothing*. Over the next few years, I took lots of photos of metal boxes outside of bodegas, and they all *sucked*. Eventually, I got one more photo of a metal box outside of a bodega that was OK, but the rest were *garbage*. It didn’t help that the metal boxes outside of bodegas are all disappearing. This box is gone, as the next box in the series is. I’m not entirely sure what the boxes are for; I surmise they were for the overnight deliver of newspapers, so the bodega could get the early edition of the paper without them getting stolen, and that the reasons the boxes are disappearing is that nobody reads newspapers anymore. The lesson here is that the more I *think* about the photo I’m taking, the worse it is. I just have to shut off my brain and shoot photos. So sadly, I’m never going to finish my metal boxes outside of bodegas series.
Closely-cropped photograph of the front façade of a home in the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. The façade is made of light-blue stucco, and the front window sill is made of red bricks. The window itself is mostly framed out of the photo, but you can see a little of its venetian blinds. Underneath the window, is a concrete planter. Growing in the planter are some green shoots, one of which has bloomed into a single yellow tulip, perfectly framed by the blue background. This photo was taken in the early spring of 2020, just a couple weeks into the lockdown. The warm yellow bloom, surrounded by cold stony surfaces recalls the mountainous regions that the tulip species is native to.
Photograph of a storefront closed off by two rolling gates, with a bench seat from a vintage automobile placed in front, in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Surrounding the seat are some planters, which are either filled with dead plants, or are entirely empty. As this photo was taken in late March a few days after the start of the lockdown, the dead plants are to be expected. The bench has acquired a graffiti tag, as would be expected, and has a rip in it, revealing a bit of the yellow foam rubber underneath. This photograph is a good illustration of the bleak, empty sense of loneliness that exemplifies the early days of the lockdown. This photograph has a slight but noticeable magenta cast in the shadows. I did quite a poor job of color-grading this film scan. I’m sorry. I promise I will pay closer attention to my green levels in the future.
Photograph of a small, red, two-story building surrounded by brownfields in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building is clad in orange-red vinyl siding which stands out in front of a deep blue sky with wispy cirrus clouds. Next to it is a hunter green temporary construction fence, covered in graffiti. That empty lot is now occupied by luxury condos, that just recently applied for an occupancy permit. Sadly, the *awesome* red siding has been replaced with boring white siding, another victim of the conspiracy to erase color from our lives.
Photograph of some fencing behind a sidewalk in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Sticking up behind the fence are some school busses, which are a little bit taller than the fence is. In the foreground on the sidewalk is a fire hydrant, which is surrounded by bollards, presumably to protect the hydrant when busses drive in and out of the lot. The fencing has a copious amount of both barbed and razor wire at its precipice, indicating that the owners are *serious* about deterring trespassers. A section of the fence has some graffiti, which has been painted over, with some more graffiti on top of that, in black and red and purple, along with a few wheatpaste posters for good measure.
Photograph of a construction office trailer at a pier along Brooklyn Bridge Park. The photo depicts an active construction site along the waterfront with ropes, and pipes, and other construction materials, with a notable number of acetylene tanks, indicating that the construction work involves a great deal of welding. In the water next to the pier are a couple of dinghies, with a ladder leading from the pier down into the water next to the boats. There is a single bright orange lifering mounted on the trailer, providing a bit of punchy color to what otherwise be a drab photograph.
Photograph of the front façade of a modernist residence in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. This photo depicts the various materials used in this eclectic building: Metal panels with a black metal mailbox and metal railings, glass doors and windows, wooden door and window frames, along with some bricks. The photo is closely-cropped to emphasize the architect’s obsessive-compulsive emphasis on horizontals and verticals, along with his rejection of color, whimsey, and joy. I hope that in the years since this structure was completed, the architect got the SSRI prescription that he desperately needed, and that this work was obviously a cry for help about.
The photograph of the side of a bodega in the Brooklyn Heights. I’ve posted several pictures of bodegas here on Bluesky, and many more on my other social media accounts, but this one is probably the most sparsely decorated bodega I have ever photographed. Most bodegas are plastered with advertisements for things like, vape products, energy drinks, and lottery tickets. This bodega has a few pictures of salads in its tiny windows, but most of the photograph is taken up by a big, blank, white stucco wall. You see, this photograph was taken in the landmarked section of Brooklyn Heights, where any outside decoration is illegal, if there isn’t a historical precedent for it. There is another deli one block away which has a big sign and an awning, but since the history of that deli goes back before 1965, it’s all grandfathered in. This photo was taken during the early days of the pandemic, about a week into the initial lockdown, when I had nothing to do except wander around, except that I couldn’t wander too far, since I didn’t want to ride the subway, and I had to ration my supply of film, and getting the film developed was a huge logistical problem. I found a film lab in rural Vermont that was still working and accepting mail-order submissions. Also present in the photo is a rusted metal box. I took a better photo of just the box a couple weeks later, and then a couple more photos of metal boxes outside of bodegas in the weeks following. Some of my best work, really, which you will see posted here soon. I wanted to make a whole series of metal boxes outside of bodegas. I tried taking more of them over the next several years, but the photos kept turning out worse and worse. You see, the more I keep trying to force a photo to happen, rather than just relying on serendipity, the worse the photos turn out.
Vertical photograph of a truck parked on the street corner of an industrial area of the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The photo was taken with a wide-angle lens, resulting in a forced perspective that makes the front grill of the truck appear larger and more prominent than it would in real life. Behind the truck, in the right side of the frame is a lot enclosed by some corrugated metal fencing, which is covered in street art. The original artist used the color teal as a background color for their art, but by this point it is now covered with lots of other tags along with the artist’s initial painting. In the foreground, the truck, too, is covered in street art, and again, the background color is teal, almost a perfect match for the fencing behind it. The fencing and the truck’s grill form a series of vertical lines through the center of the frame, while the crosswalk in front of the truck form a series of diagonal, black and white lines. A scene like this, where everything in the frame has been defaced by graffiti, would normally evoke a sense of urban decay and despair. However, in this instance, since it is a bright sunny day, and the graffiti artists have adopted such a cheerful palette or colors, you cannot help but experience a sense of joy while viewing this photograph.
Closely-cropped photograph of the front façade of a rowhouse in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building is clad in beige vinyl siding, which is old and stained and warped. The front window, at the top right of the photo, has an AC unit. The air conditioner has been leaking water for a long time, because of the rust and mineral stain that sits below it. The AC is surrounded with a metal cage, which casts a large geometric shadow across the frame. At the bottom right of the screen, pasted to the wall, is a sign that says, “WARNING. KEEP OUT. ☠️ POISON BAITED AREA. NO PETS ALLOWED!!” The sign is very old and starting to peel off, revealing an absurd amount of glue underneath. This photo is part of my Vintage Vinyl series, depicting formal compositions of vernacular buildings in various states of decay.
Did I just argue with a joke? Part of a Bluesky educational series.
Vertical photograph of a doorway to an industrial building in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. This doorway has two swinging metal mesh gates in front of the actual door, with one of the gates ajar. The wall surrounding the doorway is painted grey, and is covered in graffiti—quickly painted scrawls, each in a single color of red, black, white, green, blue, or pink, to the point that the photograph begins to resemble an abstract painting. But, as I like to point out quite often in these alt texts, this photograph is most definitely *not* an abstraction. I am not trying to create a photograph that is completely detached from its origins. I am trying to make something that is *more* than just abstraction. If you study the photograph, the more it becomes grounded in reality. All the tiny little details start to jump out at you. And I just don’t want it to just be a photograph of a door, either. I fucking want *everything*: the lines, the light, the shadow, the color, the texture, all unified into a whole.
Photograph of a fence in front of an empty lot in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The fence, consisting of plywood, 2×4s, and metal and painted navy blue, is extremely old and rickety; it looks like it could fall down at any moment. The deep blue provides an ideal background color for the bright red NO PARKING signs, and the red and white graffiti tags. To the right of the blue fencing is a small 2-foot-wide segment of chainlink fencing, where there is a large tree that has grown right through it. To the right of chainlink, someone has propped up a door in its frame. I guess the owner of this lot thought it was too much of a bother to enter the lot by opening a padlock and swinging the fence open; instead it was much easier to stick a key in a lock and go through a door. Or maybe he thought it was cheaper to buy a door and frame from Home Depot rather than a replacement for the fence that looks like it will fall over the next time someone tried to open it. Today, on Street View, the fence has met its inevitable end. It has been replaced with even cheaper sheets of plywood.
Photograph of a corner bodega in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Prominent in the photo is an ice dispenser, taken from the side. As you might expect, it is covered in graffiti, including some very bold strokes in blue, red, and black. There is also a flyer for a rock show pasted to it.
Vertical photograph of some corrugated metal fencing in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The fence is, of course, covered in street art. This particular art is interesting as the flat background of the fence is painted in a dark color, while the vertical grooves are painted bright colors, such that you see a rainbow of pink, teal, red, and yellow that becomes more prominent if you look at the fence at an angle. On top of that, other graffiti tags are painted, in black and white. Sticking up right over the fence are two shipping containers, colored red and white, which look like they are stacked on top of other shipping containers.
Photograph of the fencing in front of an empty lot in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The lot is enclosed with a combination of chainlink fencing, and corrugated metal sheets, painted brown. The sheets are attached to the chainlink fence from behind, although some sheets are leaning against the fence from the front. On the ground next to the fence is a rat poison trap, and there is a warning sign about the poison posted on the fence. This is usually an indication that construction is about to begin at a location, and this indeed was the case here. This is now a four-story, 81-unit apartment building. This is *exactly* the kind of missing middle housing that New York City (and the rest of the country) desperately needs.
Photograph of the front door to an apartment building in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The door is metal, and painted a reddish brown. There is a small window at the top with wire-reinforced safety glass. The door had once been painted over with graffiti, but the tags themselves have been painted over, with splotches of white, silver, blue, and red. The result ends up looking like something not unlike a Rothko painting, but in fact is actually *much cooler looking* than what Rothko accomplished. There is still some writing on the door: a huge “61” spray painted on the door; a sticker with the numbers “2R”, “2L”, and “3R”, meant to associate a set of doorbells with their respective apartments. Also scrawled on the door in magic marker are the words “CON ED PUSH”, “CON EDISON PUSH”, and “CE PU__” where the “SH” had clearly been rubbed off. One might imagine that there is a heretofore unknown graffiti tagger stalking the neighborhood calling themselves Con Ed Push, but that seems unlikely. One can also imagine a frustrated employee of Consolidated Edison pulling and pulling on the door in frustration, deciding that the building was locked, and leaving, leading to a very pissed off building superintendent writing on the door three times explaining how a door works.
Photograph taken through the window of a bodega in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The window is dirty and cloudy, and has four graffiti tags scrawled on it. On the inside is some shelving. The bottom shelf is filled with what are either plantains or overripe bananas. The middle and top shelves are filled with boxes of other stock. On the right is another set of shelves filled with bread products, and you can see the edge of a sign that has been placed in the window, although it is too cropped to make out what the sign is advertising.
Photograph of a large exhaust pipe coming out of a sidewalk cellar door of a building in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The door and the pipework are a red rust color, while the wall behind the door is covered in street art, which has a predominantly teal-colored palette. The top of the pipe is curved so that the pipe does not fill with water when it rains, but it otherwise square, so it looks like a large lower-case f sticking out of the sidewalk. Sitting on top of the pipe is a bodega coffee cup. The pipe is covered with stickers and tags.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy”.
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.