Elisabeth Greeberg/Playing Hot and Cold

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I found deciding upon a theme to be difficult. Both the canvass and inspiration for the project is New York City, arguably the most multifaceted and diverse place in the world. I couldn’t just pick a New York theme; instead I decided to take a more artistic route. I like playing with the emotions that various color palettes generate. A happy face can seem empty if the tone is pale while an inexpressive face can appear vivacious given warm shades and depth of color. Setting out to photograph that which I saw, I aimed to photograph familiar objects and scenes, and make them more interesting by polarizing colors, so to speak. Half of the photos, having been tweaked and edited (although never cropped) should feel cold, half should feel warm.

The setting for my album ranged from uptown to downtown, east side to west. Most of the photos come from the general vicinity of Grand Street Station and the 96^th Street Station. I did not set out with my camera and a goal, but I finished with ninety-two photos and an idea. I managed to capture a lot of photos that I liked; the trouble was a general blandness in image tone. I quickly came to recognize that in order for others to appreciate the photographs, I would have to doctor the images to elicit certain responses. At the same time however, I wasn’t interested in extreme cropping, cutting and pasting etc. I just wanted to brighten, darken, define and focus the pictures in a more thought provoking manner. In other instances I like working with grayscale but these photos seemed to require bright dashes or thin sprinklings of color.

Most of the subjects of my photos are the things we pass each day, either blindly or uninterestedly.  Many of these objects and subjects seem to have sort of mysterious back-stories, and I tried to make the photos more artistic in a sense, in an attempt to emphasize this. Main ingredients of various shots include a faded fallout shelter sign, an abandoned construction worker’s hat, a shoe hanging over a street lamp and an American flag.

I hope viewers can immediately sense the warmth or darkness I’m attempting to portray in each individual photograph. I played with tools that I felt would maintain the honesty in each picture but advance the intrigue. In this day and age, a photograph can certainly be classified as fictional or nonfictional, one can literally create a highly realistic image out of nothing. I didn’t want to sit in the gray area here, my pictures are true, enhanced, images.

The final thought I want viewers left with is a sort of obligation to make double takes when passing the things one sees all the time. It’s easy to ignore scribbles on a wall or abandoned personal artifacts but these things are interesting, and unique. I hope my play on a handful of ignored elements of New York City inspires people to slow down once in a while, and appreciate the remarkable contrasts between a neon sign and a dark street or how depressing a corny, worn-out bumper sticker can be. My photos are things that you’ve seen before, but presented in a new light.