How-to shoot a city

Vivienne Gucwa says in the book's introduction that with no formal training she started photographing the city in 2009. Using an ordinary point-and-shoot camera while wandering the streets (just like Vivian Maier) and she has come with some stunning images.

The four chapters: Street narratives; Skylines; Seasons; History, have a bit of everything. Street narratives has some wonderful snow shots mostly taken at night, some more appear in Seasons with several taken in Central Park during the day and they look equally beautiful. The same chapter has several remarkable rustic shots of the Park with reds, yellows and orange of trees during the Fall.

Skylines delivers the predictable cityscape images with vibrant sunsets and silhouettes of tall buildings, the best images here are those in mono. One taken underneath the Queensboro Bridge (page 129) is magnificent.

It's unfortunate that the book, stuffed with probably over two hundred photos, can't really make up its mind what it's delivering. Ilex, the British publisher of how-to and technical books about photography regards Gucwa's photos as more exercises in shooting a city and presented as rather bland layouts in a square book. I think so many of these images, after some serious editing, are good enough to show them in a large art photo book, one to a page with generous margins and printed on a good matt art paper.

Maybe Ms Gucwa's New York photos will shine in some future title. I'll certainly buy a copy.

 

The quiet life

In an interview at the back of the book Christine Osinski says she took these photos in the summers of 1983 and 1984 as a way of familiarising herself about Staten Island where she had moved to, from Manhattan, in 1982. Though part of New York she had always regarded SI as a rather isolated where the residents (Italians are the largest group) relaxed in their own utopia (of course, more than thirty years later the landscape has dramatically changed).

The fifty-one photos are a mix of community life, kids playing, street scenes and people, usually looking at her camera. There is not a suggestion that the busy streets of Manhattan are a mere ferry ride away. The photos seemed to project a gentle quietness as I turned the pages.

The landscape format works well with a photo a page and I thought the sequencing was particularly good. Christine Osinski's pictures deliver an interesting slice of suburban life from a few years ago.

Photos on the right track

Other books with Delano railroad photos.

Jack Delano took more railroad photos than any other FSA/OWI photographer.  The work in this interesting book was from a long assignment in the Chicago area from November 1942 through February 1943.  More work followed in April and May when he travelled on the Santa Fe freights from Chicago to San Bernardino (over two hundred from that journey are featured in The iron horse at war by James Vale).  Just under half of his rail photos (2,500 mono and 250 color) are from Chicago.

John Gruber, the editor of The railroaders, found an ideal way of connecting Delano's photos from over seventy years ago to contemporary times by finding the decendents of the workers in the original pictures and photographing them, intriguingly by Delano's son Pablo.  I think this idea has only been done once before with Bill Ganzel's Dust Bowl decent published in 1984.  His photo essay book took the original FSA work and he found the same locations and people to photograph in the seventies.  This included Florence Thompson the Migrant mother from Dorothea Lange's famous 1936 photo and Darrel Coble the little boy in Arthur Rothstein's Dust storm in Cimarron County. 

The strength of Delano's photos in the book are the semi-portraits of railroad folk.  Rather than just have shots of freight and military transports out on the main how much better to show the men and women of this industry in their work environment all pulling together in wartime.  The photos must have been reproduced extensively across the country in papers and magazines (they were free to print media).  Chicago, as the center of railroad activity had it all as the Contents reveal: On the trains; At the station; Around the yards. 

Throughout the pages the text provides plenty of detail about how the industry worked in wartime and what the forty-nine featured railroaders jobs involved but there is also  extensive coverage of their domestic life.  While some of this away from the job copy is interesting so much of it is very typical of the average worker's life whether they were making tanks, planes or ships but each industry has specific work practices and in the case of railroads it's this description I found much more informative than a typical worker's home life.

Railroaders is a fascinating look back to a tough time illustrated with powerful images and some of Pablo Delano's photos of the descendants have an extra bit of magic too, because it shows them proudly holding a copy of a photo taken by his father.