Some Days, Everything Is A Picture

Photography is always a subjective way to see the world, it is an art—you think about your composition, you omit, you choose a special detail, a segment or angle—in short:  you create.

—Brigitta Hügel

Ah, fine photographers.  They understand their equipment; they have patience and skill; they have the eye to spot the perfect shot.  My appreciation for them grows every time I venture forth with my camera.

Some days, though, everything is a picture, and even the lowliest among us can get lucky.  So it was the day we walked along the High Line, a new addition to New York City’s magnificent city parks.  As described on the park's website,

The High Line was built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement.  It lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan's largest industrial district.  No trains have run on the High Line since 1980.

After a decades-long battle, the High Line escaped demolition and was transformed into a public park.  The head of the landscape design team described it this way:

From an aesthetic and design standpoint, it has always been our position to try to respect the innate character of the High Line itself.  Our design aims to reflect its singularity and linearity, its straight-forward pragmatism, its emergent properties with wild plant-life—meadows, thickets, vines, mosses, flowers, intermixed with ballast, steel tracks, railings, and concrete.

The result is an episodic and varied series of public spaces and landscape biotopes set along a simple and consistent line—a line that cuts across some of the most remarkable elevated vistas of Manhattan and the Hudson River.

The sun shone and the sky was blue the day we took our walk, but fortunately not cloudless.

A cloudless sky can make for boring photographs, but we were lucky, for clouds there were to give the sky some shape.

We saw people intent on their work;

children intent on their play;

views out over the rooftops;

shapes and patterns everywhere.

Some days, everything is a picture.  In the old days, I would have run out of film.

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Spring Songs

Spotify Playlist:  Spring Songs

Joy Spring, by Clifford Brown, Clifford Brown Quintet

Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most, by Wolf & Landesman, sung by June Christy

It Might As Well Be Spring, by Rodgers & Hammerstein

Clifford Brown Quartet version

Bill Evans, solo piano version

 Up Jumped Spring, by Freddie Hubbard, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers

You Must Believe in Spring, by Michel LeGrand, Bill Evans Trio (Gomez, Zigmund)

Springville, by Miles Davis, Gil Evans arrangement, Miles Davis on trumpet

Spring is Here, by Rodgers & Hart 

Bill Evans Trio (LaFaro, Motian) version

Ella Fitzgerald version 

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Credits:  The quotation at the head of the post can be found here.  The quotations about the High Line can be found here and here.  The last photograph is of Sarah Sze's Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat).