Wrapped Heads

Date: 1996
Place: Hong Kong, HK
Modus operandi: Jet lagged
Weather: Muggy
Time: 3 pm
Gear: Olympus Stylus Quartz
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: Awed by the electricity of this special place
My age: 45

There’s nothing good about the flight from LA to Hong Kong, unless you include the lovely Singapore Airlines stewardess waking you with a warm meal and a smile. You arrive so zonked out on jet lag that for the first day or two eveything is strange. Sorround that strangeness with the frenetic pace of the world’s most crowded place and you have a prescription for strangeness. And fun.

These statues were patiently awaiting probably illegal export to some loony collector in New York; long live free trade!

As this really was meant to be a business trip, I restricted my gear to the small, clamshell Olympus Stylus, as sweet a piece as Olympus ever made. When not in use the built-in cover slid over the wide angle lens and the whole thing slipped nicely into a pocket. Or suit. The lens may not have been the greatest – barely better than the one on its predecessor, the Rollei 35 – but it was adequate for little memorabilia like this. And how could anyone resist the wild surrealism of this scene?

Sunday paper

Date: 1984
Place: Greenwich Village, NYC
Modus operandi: Getting some air
Weather: Gorgeous
Time: 1 am
Gear: Pentax ME Super
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: See. Click. move on.
My age: 33

Mindlessly long work days on Wall Street would always drive me out on the streets of New York for some walk-about pictures at the weekend, not to mention the ever present risk of a good mugging. I adopted rough clothes and my ‘don’t mess with me’ tough guy walk (OK, actually looking over my shoulder, ready to run) – such was early ’80s Manhattan. The world’s richest city with no proper policing or law and order. On Wall Street or off.

Greenwich Village was still trying to be hip and trendy then, though the reality was that it was overexposed in the media and $1mm wouldn’t get you very much in the shape of decent real estate. Still, it was fun for its squiggly streets and outrageous personalities.

Here’s one of those wealthy Manhattanites grabbing the Sunday paper in his megabucks co-op downtown.

Bermuda

Date: July, 1999
Place: Bermuda, near St. Catharine’s Fort
Modus operandi: From the seat of a scooter
Weather: Gorgeous
Time: 1 pm
Gear: Leica M6
Medium: Kodak Gold 100
Me: Stop! Stop! Stop!
My age: 47

There’s not a lot of good things I recall about 1999. I spent much of that year working for a bunch of hillbillies at a big bank in Charlotte, a city whose cuisine may be worse than even England’s in the 1960s. Not to mention the foul humid summers and freezing cold winters. And people who would say one thing to your face, another behind your back. Fughedaboutit! Before you could say “Where’s ma grits?” we were back on a one way flight to San Francisco.

Not, however, before we took a one week side trip to the lovely island of Bermuda. That, and the return to civilization later, were the high points of the year. Good British food (strange, I know, but true), French wines and Cuban cigars. There’s a lot to be said for those. Add a spectacularly beautiful place which limits tourists to 25 mph scooters, and you have a fine venue for any photographer.

One of the best was the annual cricket match between North and South, one of the oldest fixtures in sports. Another day found us at St. Catharine’s Fort, one of many built by the British to keep out marauding Americans. The Fort never fired its enormous guns in anger, the Yankees doubtless having concluded that discretion was the better part of valor.

Leaving the Fort we were tooling along when I caught the above out of the corner of my left eye. I ran back and just one click recorded the magical combination of clouds and color. This one hangs over our mantlepiece and works well in an otherwise simple room.

The lens and camera used bear comment. The body was the much unloved Leica M6, which had a rangefinder that would flare out in just about any light and a built-in meter that could only be read at eye level. Not so smart for candids. I sold it a while later with no regrets, reverting to my M2.

The lens was far more interesting.

No thanks to the jerks running my employer (my stock options, if I had them today would still be worthless – 8 years later ….) all I could afford in the ultra-wide area for my Leica was a Russian Orion 20mm, which ran me some $200 from a reseller in England! This came with a massive and very good finder and recessed all the way into the M’s body, after fitting the obligatory screw-to-bayonet adapter. Maximum aperture was a modest f/5.6. You had to reach into the lens to adjust the aperture, so forget about a protective filter. The aperture ring was hard to grasp, the settings were not click stopped and were most certainly not linearly spaced. Further, the lens did not couple to the M’s viewfinder and the finish of the whole thing would make even a Chinese tool maker blush. In other words, an ergonomic disaster, quite the worst piece of equipment from that perspective I have ever used. But it took nice sharp pictures and we got on fine for many years until more money than sense saw it replaced by the ultimate 21mm exotic, Leica’s fabulous f/2.8 Aspherical Elmarit. That’s a story for another time.

Rocker

Date: May 18, 2007
Place: San Mateo Drive, San Bruno, CA
Modus operandi: Waiting for my son’s swimming lesson to end
Weather: Cold and windy
Time: 1:32 pm
Gear: Panasonic Lumix LX1
Medium: Digital, processed in Aperture, ISO 80, 1/640, f/2.8
Me: Always on the lookout for mystery on the street
My age: 55

Our son, aged five, loves the water and is becoming a competent swimmer in no small part thanks to the lessons he is taking at a swimming place in San Bruno in the San Francisco Bay Area. While he practises his dives I make it a habit to walk around this colorful area, pretty much assured of some bit of magic on the streets. Ethnic food stores (would you believe a Fijian food store?) abound and the scrappy, immigrant nature of the area is thrilling photographically.

I could not help but being struck by the mystery of this scene and the lovely little Lumix came through, aided in no small part by the widescreen image format native to this fine camera.

Bergie’s

Date: 1984
Place: Fifth Avenue and 58th Street, New York City
Modus operandi: Looking at store windows
Weather: Gorgeous
Time: 11:00 am
Gear: Pentax ME Super, 28mm Takumar
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: Gorgeous location, superb architecture, the poshest store in New York – what could be better?
My age: 33

For many years two of the finest women’s clothing stores in mid-town Manhattan were catty corner (English translation: Diagonally opposite) one another on Fifth Avenue: Bonwit Teller at 56th Street and Bergorf Goodman at 57th.

Bonwit’s no longer exists, pulled down in the middle of the night in 1981, before the City could place a restraining order on him, by that crass vulgarian, Donald Trump. With it went those gorgeous sandstone friezes that decorated the facade. In its place we got the gauche Trump Tower, replete with glitz to attract Eurotrash.

Bergie’s (no one calls it Bergorf Goodman), on the other hand, survived, and thrives on The Ladies who Lunch to this day.

I could never pass either store on my walk to work from my luxury high rise apartment (meaning infested rat trap) on 56th at Eighth, to what was then the Citicorp Center on Lex and 53rd, without stopping to gaze in their windows. And what windows they were! Never less than perfectly arranged, the best of European designers’ work was to be found there. St. Laurent, Givenchy, Ungaro, Marc Bohan (then at Dior). No, not Tommy Hilfiger. The polyester set could shop elsewhere.

This particular day I had detoured north of 57th and was making my way west along 58th Street, a rather mysterious passageway betwen Bergies and The Plaza, with that nice cinema near Fifth which remains there today. Having long been fascinated with the great school of 1930s American high rise architecture – perhaps best seen in Chicago – I was really looking forward to eyeing the Pierre and the Sherry-Netherland, in much the same way that one might a beautiful woman. Much to look at and dwell upon. A feast for the eyes and senses. A corner here, a bit of mystery there, never has architecture been so much fun.

Just before turning right on Fifth I glanced up at Bergie’s window, the one fronting onto 58th Street and there they were – the two grand hotels of New York City. But the real magic happened when those two ladies joined the reflection in Bergie’s window.

Can you say ‘click’?

Note: On this occasion I was using my ‘disposable’ Pentax ME Super rather than the M3. New York streets were seriously dangerous at this time and the theft of the cheap Pentax would not stir the soul as deeply as were I to lose my precious Leica. In the event, that preciously engineered and very compact Pentax turned out to be a wonderful street worker during my New York years (1981-87), only finally moving on when the LEDs in the viewfinder started to play up. Needless to add, it was never stolen.