"DOES IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS?": Summer Afternoon Street Photography in Times Square

It's often joked about that tourists and the people who actually live in New York have vastly different opinions on and experiences of Times Square. In short, the former make some kind of effort to go to there; the latter make every possible effort to avoid it.

While living in New York, I did my share of avoiding Times Square where possible, but I'd qualify that by saying that the more I took photos on the street, the more time actually spent there. At the very least, if, like on this summer Friday in 2016, I had some time to kill, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to wander down there and take a few shots.

This location attracted me because, admittedly, I am not a particularly bold street photographer. I don't want to get right up into people's faces, and I don't want to provoke a confrontation with anyone. Though it may limit just what sort of shots I can take, I am most comfortable shooting on the street when I know I can easily blend in to my surroundings.

Times Square is perfect, sort of, because there are a lot of different looking people from all over, clustered into this relatively small geographic area, and most of the time, they're looking not at me taking a picture, but at the bombardment of billboards, lights, skyscrapers, and costumed characters around them. And, if people see me taking a picture, I don't stand out all that much—it's Times Square. A lot of people are taking pictures.

Its main problem, though, is that there is so much going on and so many people around that it can be hard to find a clear subject. And I've often shot first and figured that I'd sort it out later through cropping. (It's not a great habit, and I do aim to do better.)

Still, by sheer saturation of people and how they cluster and group, even using that fingers-crossed method, it isn't too hard to find at least something.

As I went back through these, I noticed a contradiction to the common wisdom about differing tourist and New Yorker opinions on Times Square. That Hyundai Elantra billboard that asks "DOES IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS?" feels like some sort of mean trick, because I don't get the sense that that's the sentiment of many of the persons sitting on these steps. Most look about as happy as New Yorkers teleported from a few blocks over into this peculiar public space, this bank of steps on which one sits as if to watch a show, but, to anyone walking uptown, you there sitting on the steps are the show.

In fact, aside from this one photo I have of a happy photographer walking away with their shot (come to think of it, given what I just wrote, they very well could've taken a photo of me and I didn't even know it), it looks like I didn't see many thrilled or excited people that summer Friday afternoon.

It also turns out that, at the time I was shooting this, it was a whopping 92 degrees in New York City. So I can understand how, after however many hours of travelling or walking, one finds oneself here in the supposed center of the universe, it's boiling hot, and you're catching your breath in front of a sign that suggests that you are supposed to be having the most amazing time right now.

I empathize, in part because I now realize I lived through a different version of roughly this same scenario.

My wife and I vacationed in France in August of 2018. We arrived excited, but also quite jet-lagged and exhausted, and we just so happened to get there on the trailing end of a sever heat wave. But, having read A Moveable Feast a few months earlier, I was eager to visit Ernest Hemingway's old haunts, and that's how we found ourselves having lunch in the outdoor café section of Le Select, quite hot and very uncomfortable, with few actual Parisians in sight.

The only thing we would need to complete the picture would be a billboard behind us saying in French, "DOES IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS?".

State College on a Thursday at 8:30 a.m.

Until now, I've never really thought of my photography in terms of projects—that is, in terms of long term choices of subject and/or style that might add up to some sort of larger whole. Series of daily posts or single blog posts about a topic or event were the largest sized chunks that I'd think about.

But in the past few weeks, as I've gone down a rabbit hole of listening to photography podcast after photography podcast, I've grown more aware of photographers talking about their projects—these ongoing works intended towards some eventual, curated whole, but whose end form isn't often very well defined in advance. While examples are many, the ones I have in mind are things like Kyle McDougall's project on the American southwest, discussed occasionally in his podcast The Contact Sheet, Neil Kramer's Quarantine in Queens, and Angela Douglas's Slowly Drowning. Work like this appeals to me because of its blend of top-down and bottom-up structure—while some intention drives the activity of going out and taking these photos (or, in Kramer's case, taking these photos while compelled to stay in), it is regular practice and the passage of time that give the photographer the perspective that enables them to say when it is done and what photos comprise the end product.

I'm hoping to turn the practice I started during my break—doing street photography in downtown State College—into one such project of my own. Though I'm a drive away from downtown, I'm there or pass through there often enough that I can do it somewhat regularly. And, as I am in year four of a six year graduate program, there is probably going to be a de facto end to the project in the future, which should provide just enough of a framework to keep me focused on getting out and taking photos as consistently as I can.

This is a bit more intentional than street photography I'd done in New York, in which I'd mostly take photos on the way to and from work. But I hope this intentionality helps me pay more attention and think more about not just getting a shot, but getting a good one. So I'm hoping to dig in, spend some time, and get a better sense of how light, shadow, and the flow of traffic and persons behave in this particular place at various times of day throughout the year.

That was the idea behind these photos, taken this past Thursday between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. with a Ricoh GR II (shooting in JPG using the high-contrast black and white effect). I tried to keep an eye out for good light and interesting compositions, and also to start taking some mental notes on where to go and what to try and shoot if I'm downtown early on a weekday. Here's a bit of what I found.

There's a stereotypical street photography shot that often comes up on Instagram in which someone is walking into or out of a hard shadow cast against a wall. In one episode of The Contact Sheet, Sean Tucker joked about how this move isn't really all that hard to do. So I decided to make it a goal to try and do it that morning, and while this isn't a perfect example of it, surely enough, there's a spot on Fraser Street where a shadow casts a hard line against the wall at this time of day, with an added bonus of this happening against this tiled wall. As Tucker said, not all that difficult to find, but probably requires just a bit more patience and time to take the shot at just the right time with just the right subject crossing that line.

Since one of my goals for the day was finding interesting light and shadow, I did find College Avenue to be a bit of a dud, in that the sidewalk opposite campus, where the shops and restaurants are, is largely in shadow at that point. There was, though, this tableau across the street, with Penn State's iconic Old Main in the background. Only during editing did I notice the reflection on the roof of the car in the foreground.

I feel like the physical infrastructure of State College is very much on display. Maybe it's just because I was going through alleys to get from spot to spot, but looking back through the photos I shot, there are plenty of power lines and, on the sides of buildings, wiring and air conditioner tubing. It's enough that that infrastructure could probably be a sub-project in itself.

Its presence in some places and absence in others in a way marks the passage of time, as blocks of irregular buildings with their wires and tubes become replaced by large high rises.

State College in Black and White. Rain and the Ricoh GR II.