Trip to New York

Over the next week or so I'm going to put up a bunch of posts about exhibitions I saw in New York, however I thought it worth putting up a general post about my holiday from a photography perspective.

So this was a family holiday and in truth I went with little intention to take anything but snaps. This was a bit frustrating as I was repeatedly aware of fantastic photo opportunities sitting there waiting for me. The flip slide was that I was aware of how easy it was to just fall into the trap of taking cliched genre shots - particularly of street scenes. However, I've always loved playing with a well trodden cliche. But even capturing these cliches would have taken time and patience that I didn't have.

I thought I might be able to get some lucky shots for my current Assignment, but soon decided that this was best forgotten as it would become frustrating for my family and then myself.

However, I really didn't want to miss up the opportunity of visiting some of the art galleries. The obvious one was MoMA as it features in so much of what I read. I managed to convince my wife and family to attend as well - though they did walk round at a different pace to me.... Overall I was a bit disappointed as I was expecting more from the archive and a greater number of photographers represented, it was also extremely busy.

I was also staying just round the corner from the Aperture offices so managed to visit their gallery on a particularly rainy afternoon when everyone else wanted to hangout in the hotel.

My wife and kids also then decided that they wanted to go and see a matinee of the Spider-man musical and I was given the option (which I took), of taking some more time for myself visiting some more galleries.

I did some research on other galleries it was worth visiting - surprisingly other than MoMA they were all private galleries (so nothing in Guggenheim!?), but many were in the same area as Aperture (Chelsea) and so I was able to visit these the following day.

There were undoubtedly a whole bunch of other galleries that I could have attended, but it was fantastic to be able to go to these galleries in the Chelsea area, all of which were very quiet and welcoming and contained some really inspirational work.

Viewing this amount of work in different galleries gave me a new perspective on this means of viewing photography. The size of the work starts to have far more bearing on the work itself, as does the ability to really linger on a set of work one piece at a time or scanning across multiple images at the same time, drifting from one back to the other, viewing from a dinstance or stepping in really close. All of this is very different to the act viewing digital images (often of mixed quality and size) over the internet - it feels very static and stale in comparison to the gallery experience.