Street

[Attempting to upload slideshow]

The photos presented were taken at three separate locations at three different times.  The ones that were taken first are the prominently orange photos, those littered with utility poles and water towers, were taken on the way back from LBI during an early summer sunset.  I gasped at the colors flooding the car and related to my mother how much I love telephone wires.  In response she fished my camera out of the back and handed it over.  I clicked the last of the sun’s fading rays into the memory card and dubbed the collection of blurred telephone wires “pretty jersey” in tribute to New Jersey’s often discounted and ignored beauty.  The set is full of traffic lights and pick-up trucks, the highlight being a perfectly placed water tower, which was well within my camera’s grasp. 
When I first took these pictures in the beginning of the summer it gave me an amorphous idea.  It started with the simple thought of documenting Jersey’s ignored beauty and then rubbing it in the noses of my out of state friends and then it became more soul searching.  A lonely mini-van, trying to figure out how it is that Jersey can be so amazing yet so deadening at the same time.  I cast my family’s white Windstar as the pensive minivan, a kind of super-auto-hero.  This photo assignment allowed me to come back to this long dormant project, though the Windstar was not my mode of transport.  I took pictures from NJTransit buses and out of the sunroof in my mother’s tiny silver Volvo. I took the project wherever I was driven.
I knew that my project would become quite literally street photography so I knew the issues I would have to deal with.  Taking pictures while in motion is difficult and often frustrating.  If the windows of the vehicle are up, direct specs and fuzziness are expected, and unfortunate reflections often encountered.  Also I can’t ask the bus driver to slow down on the highway.  Sometimes I want a certain sign by a certain car and by the time the camera clicks I have the side of a building in my sights instead.  Things get blurred and trucks always come out of nowhere.  The perfect composition is fleeting so I click-click-click until the guy sitting next to me harrumphs and gives me a dirty look.  Then there are those funny and few beauties between the blurred, a single slide of the movie that I’ve seen over and over again.  That building, river, sign that I see everyday made solid for me in some photo betraying my movement yet slyly un-fictionalizing it by making the object stand still for me.
Then when I took pictures at night, in the rain, things became even more complicated.  I had no set idea for style in this series so I was clicking at will, paying little attention to he light and clicking way at tail lights and traffic lights and diner lights.   I shuffled around the shutter speed some, trying to let in more light so as to get a better shot.  Then, as I looked at the photos I took with the longer exposures, I realized I was playing light tricks, having completely forgotten about how pinpoints of light will streak around during a long exposure photo.  I then proceeded to play around with the shutter speed a lot more and took a lot of curly-cue pictures of car lights.  My accidental re-realization made what was a very frustrating picture experience into a rather delightful one.
The final set of pictures was made up of ones that were taken this November on one of my daily bus rides to and from New York.  I happened upon a beautiful day where the trees were bare and the clouds were shining.  The photos I took were in some ways, great disappointments, because the beauty I had seen, in the incandescent clouds and far off vistas, was impossible to catch with the camera I had from the vehicle I was in.  But when I thought I was going to have to settle, I looked through all those photos and found bizarre beauties within the folds.  I made some accidental images that invoke the strange and wonderful beauty I see as I drive through the Meadowlands each morning and afternoon.  It’s otherworldliness, stuck between wilderness and suburbia.
Each set of photographs stands up on its own accord.  There are multitudes of photos from each shoot and you can literally see my journey through New Jersey with each of the series.  At first I was afraid that mingling them would take away from their strength.  Yet as I picked out my favorites from each set and placed them all together I saw all three bizarre personalities swirl together in a carnival whirlwind that I call home.  Separate each group of photographs is Jersey.  The Jersey that is simplified and mocked.  Together they begin the white Windstar’s journey for him.  Together they begin to explain how Jersey is so inspiring yet so depressing at the same time.