Perhaps because I am hyperverbal – in person, in my writing, in my consumption of information, in my choice of entertainment – it perhaps should not be surprising that I take great pleasure in the visual and silent pursuit of photography. I do not have, I have long known, a visual imagination, but my purchase of a camera in 2013 has enabled me to capture some of what I see in the world and the way in which I see it. So I when I leave my apartment, I am most often accompanied by a bulky DSLR, the better to see you with, although I do snag the occasional great image with nothing but my phone.
In this second pandemic restricted year, I haven’t traveled far beyond Manhattan – and I’ve not been out of New York more than a half-dozen times since March of last year. But even when my more expected pleasures, namely movies and theatre, aren’t available, I hope these images give a sense of how much there still is to see in just a few miles radius, and all for free. Beyond that, I’ll let these speak for themselves.
Taking extreme care during the pandemic, particularly when New York was the first and hardest hit in the earliest days, my journeys beyond my apartment and the immediate surroundings put significant limitations on my truest hobby: photography. Because I remained in Manhattan for all but two brief excursions beyond its borders (one lasting only a few hours, the other overnight), my range of locations and subjects was necessarily narrow.
But I was compelled to take pictures whenever I could do so safely, and while the majority of my time was spent in Riverside Park and Central Park, I did venture onto the subway and to a few other neighborhoods occasionally for a change of pace. Photography offers me two great diversions: the first is the sport of actually spotting and capturing an image, the second is the surprising relaxation I find when I concentrate on optimizing the photos for public consumption.
So on a site that I began in order to express myself in writing, I now want to offer up only images, which may be familiar to those who are friends or followers on Facebook and, to a lesser degree, to those who follow me on Instagram, where I try to not repeat too much from FB. In the earliest months of the pandemic, I photographed a lot of dogs while the dog runs were closed, posting more than 100 of them on social media, but I have refrained from including them here.
Here’s to a 2021 where we can live without the threat of widespread disease and travel more freely to see those we love wherever they may be – and to capture images, whether mental or digital, wherever we go.
