I hit the ground running when I got back home from New York City a couple of weeks ago. I’m just now getting around to processing the film and looking through all the photos I made while walking the streets of lower and midtown Manhattan.

© Armando Bellmas

There are three things I did a lot of while I was in New York City: met a bunch of very creative and interesting people, drank lots of Ketel One, and walked my ass off.

© Armando Bellmas

It was during my seemingly endless walks that I would search for pieces of the city that I could bring home with me in photographs. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. It was a vague craving for something that would move me in a different way.

© Armando Bellmas

I had six days to take it all in and I was damn sure going to try to take as much of it home with me as I could. I posted this tweet to Twitter as I wandered down yet another street that I’d never been down before:

Last night here. Wandering around in a futile attempt to take it all back home with me.

Greedy, I know. I wanted to soak up and bring back so much of New York City that I wouldn’t miss it as much as I have after leaving it in the past.

© Armando Bellmas

In the end these photographs, and the countless others still on the contact sheets, have been a wistful reminder of my rambles around lower Manhattan. They capture exactly what I saw and experienced, even if I’m still not sure what I was looking for.

Thelonious Monk / Bob Dylan

I’m reading Bob Dylan’s autobio Chronicles Volume One and came across this great story about Thelonious Monk.

Sometimes [Monk would] be in [the Blue Note club on 3rd Street] in the afternoon sitting at the piano all alone playing stuff that sounded like Ivory Joe Hunter — a big half-eaten sandwich left on top of his piano. I dropped in there one the afternoon, just to listen — told him that I played folk music up the street. “We all play folk music,” he said. Monk was in his own dynamic universe even when he dawdled around.
Even then, he summoned magic shadows into being. [my emphasis]

Wow!

How would like you or what you did to be referred to in such a way?

A few post-worthy things that have been buzzing around in my head lately.

⇓ A sort of privacy in public
Wendy Richmond writes about “What We Reveal” in the latest issue of Communication Arts. (It’s the Design Annual issue, not online yet.) She touches on one of the things that I love most about New York City.

During a recent television interview on NYI, the host, Sam Roberts, asked me, “Is New York City different from other places?” I responded that for me, a major difference is its extreme density and the intense, unconscious aptitude of its inhabitants that enables us to share our public space. We are able to be close and simultaneously maintain our distance — a sort of privacy in public.

⇓ Because of the times
Bob Dylan write a few words about our new President and the challenges he and all of us as Americans have ahead of us. Obama’s election is “the first step in a long, hard journey for America.”

Dylan writes:

Let us not forget how our founding fathers had no experience in governing a nation, but they succeeded based solely on the fact that they had to succeed.

Sometimes that is really all it takes: such a strong desire for something that you have to succeed. It’s what they call the American dream. Not that we always succeed, it’s that we succeed when we need it most. Today can be a day to be proud to be an American, but also a day for people with a vision to come together and try building a better and stronger America. We cannot fail, but I think that is why we will succeed.

I love that line: Such a strong desire for something that you have to succeed. You can apply that to almost anything: our country, your work, parenting, marriage, etc.

(You may have to become Bob Dylan’s friend on Facebook to read the whole note. I don’t know what’s weirder: that Bob Dylan is on Facebook or that he and I are “friends” on Facebook.)

⇓ My, you have a…
Lovely Package is a recent discovery all about product design. They bill themselves as “the leading source for the very best that package design has to offer.” It’s a constant source of awe and desire.

© Armando Bellmas

“I memorized a face so it’s not forgotten
I hear the wind whistlin’
Come back anytime
And we’ll mix our lives together”

from “Home” by David Byrne & Brian Eno

Hands down, Lou Reed’s New York is one of my favorite records of all-time. Lou’s at the top of his game musically, topically, lyrically (mostly), and emotionally (though with ol’ deadpan Lou it’s hard to tell sometimes).

Released in 1989, it’s a somewhat dated commentary on New York City and our society in general. There are many frank ideas about wealth, poverty, failed leadership, religion, greed, and race throughout the set that are timeless and, sadly, unresolved or unchanged.

On the whole it’s one of Lou’s better albums.

One song in particular — “Strawman” — always gets me riled up, partly because of the subject matter and partly because you can really hear Lou getting riled up himself.

The words to the tune are pretty simple and self-explanatory. I always find myself summing them up with one simple question that Lou himself asks in the song:

Does anyone need a $60,000 car?

Now I don’t know what Lou drives nor do I begrudge anyone for owning a $60,000 car. The song just gives me a little perspective and sometimes I — better yet, we — need that more than anything else.

Take a few minutes and listen for yourself.

Lou Reed “Strawman”
from New York

My kids love public transportation. Especially Charlotte’s new light rail system.

Every time my two-year-old daughter Sophie sees anything pertaining to public transportation — a city bus or light rail train — she calls out LIGHT RAIL! in that sweet little voice of hers.

My five-year-old son Nick knows all the light rail and Charlotte Trolley stops from 7th Street to Tyvola.

Anyway, it’s a fondness for kids and their obsession with public transportation that endears me to illustrator Christoph Niemann’s The Boys and the Subway, a story and illustrations from his blog Abstract City at The New York Times.

Check out these excerpts:

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

My sons Arthur, 5, and Gustav, 3, are obsessed with the New York City subway system.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

People often ask me for directions in the subway. Even though I know my way around rather well, I still have to defer to Arthur very often. Yet it seems people don’t trust the advice of a preschooler. They should.

You gotta see and read the whole piece. It’s priceless.

Back in Charlotte from a week-long residency in New York City. I use the word residency mainly because I felt very natural there, as if I had been there for years instead of just days.

Collecting loot and drinking pints, riding the subway, navigating the people, the streets, and the blocks of lower Manhattan, tapas in the Village with friends, finding things to do and see and places to poke into…it all just seemed so effortless and natural. I miss it already.

The main reason for my trip to New York was to show my book to some photo editors with whom I’ve established a phone/email rapport over the past several months. Making that face-to-face connection with anyone that may hire me — better yet: anyone that may trust me to shoot and deliver an assignment — is very important to me.

Most of the editors and art directors I work with here in Charlotte are people I’ve met in person and even broken bread with, so to speak. I value those relationships immensely and am always making an effort to strengthen them as time permits.

Since some/most of the magazines I’d like to shoot for are based in New York, a trip up there to meet the photo editors of those magazines, on this and future trips, is appropriate.

I met with and showed my book to thirteen photo editors. Some looked while others turned the pages, some turned the pages of the book quickly, some turned them slowly, some asked about the images, some asked questions about me, some crossed their arms the whole time, some said a lot, some said barely anything, one showed me around the magazine’s offices and offered me the views of Manhattan from their lofty windows, and one shared some incredibly forthcoming and valuable advice about improving my book and shooting for them in the future.

I didn’t expect to walk out of my meetings with an assignment or with the promise of one. All I wanted from these meetings was the opportunity to meet these people, face to face, and strengthen our relationships.

Some relationships take years to build. Yet each begins with one person making a move towards the other and putting out their hand for a hearty handshake. It may sound a bit naive or too hopeful, but it’s the honest truth.