If you ever decide to explore the nether-wharfs and industrial rockslides of Brooklyn and Queens, I recommend bringing a friend, or a camera, or both. Matters of aesthetic appreciation aside, personal safety is an issue you do not want to neglect -- you need to maximize the odds that at least one of member of your party will stagger back to the police station, hair blanched into dandelion fluff from pure shock, to file the report. Or at the very least, that a poorly-lit photo providing clues about your last few moments will turn up on the internet.
Colin has been a great companion on these adventures. He has a great photographic eye, an hyperactive imagination, and all of the reflexes necessary to slither over or around a chain link fence without harm to life, limb, or lens.
In the city, carrying a camera is almost like carrying a weapon. Cameras utilize the same terminology as guns (aim, shoot, reload), the same focusing and timing skills, the predatory instincts. We use them to grasp, perceive, capture, and indict each other. Pretty much everyone is packing a camera these days on their cell phones, but even so, nothing raises suspicion faster than poking around and taking pictures. Many cities are making efforts to criminalize this sort of activity, even as government surveillance of the public continues to escalate. This spring I was stopped and questioned in Mesa, AZ while walking around in broad daylight taking pictures of old roadside motel signs; the cops were polite enough, but couldn't figure out -- even after I explained -- why anyone would be doing what I was doing.
The backstreets, waterways and blasted heaths of the outer boroughs are a rich breeding ground for inspiration, but you have to be willing to go out and look for yourself, to brave the unpleasant sights and smells and maybe people, to always be ready with brave smile and an excuse should you run into trouble. Whatever you bring back with you (the memory of a silver egret seen dancing among piles of shredded tires, a photo of an ancient mechanical relic) is yours to keep and sow into whatever you are working on or thinking about.
That's the idea that I think this portrait has captured. The Page of Swords seems perfectly at home in a world of lush decay, both organic and technological, dense with information. Even the sky has writing on it! Colin appears truly innocuous -- a mixed blessing, he would probably say -- but he could very easily be up to no good. There is a tension here too, as if he's spring-loaded to vanish at the first sign of alarm. What is he looking at, and why? As he hovers there on the ledge, you want to see what he sees.
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