At the time I was actually dismayed that these people were in my photographs; after all the point of urban exploration is to go where there are no people. It wasn’t until years later when the amazing High Line park opened and this once tranquil preserve became a world attraction, flooded daily with people, that I realized how lucky I was to capture that moment. These two people, out in the alien zone above the city, all alone, represent our spirit of adventure and discovery.

[Show as slideshow]

Just in time for Christmas, the 2009 Urban Exploration New York City calendar is now available. Featuring images from the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, Revere Sugar Factory, High Line, and more!

Printed: 12 months, 13.5″ x 19″, coil binding, white interior paper (100# weight), full-color interior ink, $29.99.

Click the image or click here to purchase.

From The Boston Globe (Link)

With the end of the Olympics in Beijing, all eyes turned for a moment to London, site of the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics. While looking for good photographs of London, I was contacted by London photographer Jason Hawkes, who had some wonderful images of London, seen from above at night (from a helicopter, to be exact) – some of which which he’s agreed to let me share here. From Jason: “Shooting aerial photography during the daytime had its own difficulties, you are strapped tightly into a harness leaning out of the helicopter, shouting directions through the headsets to the pilot. If shooting in the day can be difficult, night and the lack of light causes its own set of problems, but overcoming them is half the fun and the results can be stunning. I shoot at night using the very latest digital cameras, mounted on either one or two gyro stablazied mounts, depending on the format of the camera and length of lens I’m having to use.”

Click on the link or the picture to see the rest of them. They are stunning.

I met up with a London photographer last Friday night who had done some painting with light. I’ve always wanted to try it but when you are alone at night it isn’t smart to just leave your camera while you run across the street to act like a fool for 20 seconds. It turns out this is much harder than it looks because you have to paint in 3D something you can’t even see. Thank god for my hyper sense of spacial relations.

This last one was featured on Gothamist.

More here.

Boston was described by a geography friend of mine as a “baby city”. I’m sure no one in Boston would feel that way but coming from New York it is easy to see how you could look at Boston like a baby city. Boston was comfortable. It wasn’t noisy, the streets weren’t filled with a sea of people (in some places they were but it wasn’t a rush, more like a slow crawl where people were stopping to see the sights.) It was also clean, which I don’t think I would ever say had I not lived in New York. Or maybe that just speaks to how dirty New York is (it is, but that’s how we like it, isn’t it?)

I came up for the Geography Conference but only went to a couple of seminars and blew the whole thing off for most of the week. I really came up to hang out and walk around and that’s what I did. But I came to Boston with the idea in my head that I knew what I was doing with my life, that I had a path and I could see the end of it. I come back to New York questioning what it is I really want to do. I still want to do Urban Planning, I think, but the closer I come to graduation the less I know what that means. Maybe I just got a giant dose of academia and realized that that wasn’t what I wanted, though I think I already knew that.

I remember when I was a kid, I was totally obsessed with dinosaurs and I knew I wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up. Soon that passed and what I wanted was to be was an astronaut. Space was my life. But then I grew out of that too. When I first went to college I went for Industrial Design, and though I don’t think I ever wanted to do that professionally, I knew design would play a big part in my life. I remember the day a professor recommended urban planning as a major, since I was very interested in the city and very much not interested in designing products. The more I learned about it the more I liked the idea. But always in the back of my head I remembered the times when I was truly passionate about something else, only to wake up one day and lose total interest. It scared me that this would happen again some day when it would actually matter. As a kid you can think you want to be whatever but when you grow up and need to find a job, having fleeting passions isn’t going to work out when you need to pay the bills.

But perhaps that was the problem, that Boston was my passion all along. I kept up the T website and would look longingly at maps of Boston, remembering the great times I had there and remembering how it sparked my interest in cities. Maybe going back was what I needed to realize that that was the wrong direction, that I left the city because there wasn’t anything there for me and there still isn’t. Maybe this is the city telling me to move forward, to focus on the new possibilities in New York and in greater cities still. Perhaps the reason I am so conflicted is because I was looking for something that wasn’t there, something that I only remember, and that may have not even really existed in the first place. I think I finally saw Boston as an outsider and it shook me up. Maybe this was the world’s way of saying keep your eye on the prize and don’t look back.

I remember walking down Centre St in JP to the Orange Line to get to Back Bay and I thought I heard someone call my name. I looked back but I didn’t see anyone, but as I was doing this an image of Lot’s wife flashed in front of my eyes as she looked back on her burning home, only to be instantly turned into a pillar of salt. I turned back around, thinking that if I kept looking back I too would transform into a pillar, a monument to all that I have left behind. I think that is the fatal flaw of Boston, that it recognizes and fetishists it’s past, looking back longingly to an era that was perceived as being greater, but in reality wasn’t. The city cannot get past the past, and that is something I cannot do.

Here is a map of all the places I walked last week, some with links to images I took on my Flickr page.

Hipsters and the Homeless: Exploration of the underground.

A relic of the old elevated subway days, Sedgwick Ave station connected the Jerome Ave line (4 train) to the 9th Ave Elevated. This was the connection between the old Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, the origin of the term “subway series”. The elevated were torn down over 50 years ago and very little remain. When the 9th Ave was torn down Sedgwick Ave stayed in operation as a shuttle between Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds but when the Giants packed up for the west coast there was no need (also the city had built a proper subway connecting the two stations in the 1930s).

For more information on Sedgwick Ave: Abandoned Stations : Sedgwick Ave

For the full sets of mine and reveire’s images (as well as full sized ones for your desktops):
Reveire3
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