Photographs and thoughts on photography and camera collecting
I was surprised to find that the church complex mentioned in the previous post (An Oasis in downtown White Plains) contained a small vegetable garden.
I can recognize corn, cabbage and tomatoes and there are probably other vegetables that I’m not familiar with.
Taken with an iphone 5s.
My wife was shopping in White Plains, NY and while waiting I took the dog for a short walk. I was surprised to across this small oasis in the middle of downtown White Plains, NY. It’s a complex of buildings related to the St. John the Evangelist Church.
According to The Eastern State Journal. White Plains, Saturday June 11, 1892:
The Reynal Memorial Church of St. John the Evangelist was built and with the grounds, church furniture and vestments complete, were given to the parish by Mrs. Nathalia F. Reynal.
Mrs. Reynal is a daughter of the late Nathaniel D. Higgins, the successful and wealthy carpet manufacturer from whom she inherited a large property. She erects this elegant and costly church “to the glory of God and to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in loving memory of her father and son”. The country residence and landed estate of her father was in this town, about two miles from the church, and it has been kept intact and as a summer home for the Reynal family. Mrs. Reynal’s town house is 263 Madison avenue, New York city. This church is to be for all time a monument to her christian charity and an evidence of her profound regard for the spiritual welfare of her fellow mortals.
The church edifice is 163 feet 10 inches deep by sixty seven feet in width, with a tower twenty-to feet square and seventy five feet high. The facade of the church is surmounted with a stone cross. The style of architecture is early perpendicular English gothic and is built of quarry-dressed blue, Vermont marble. The nave of the church is 146×67 feet and sixty-seven feet high, and will accommodate about 1,000. The ceiling is an open timbered trussed roof supported by ten columns eighteen inches in diameter. The three altars are of Caen marble. Over the main altar is a picture representing the vision of St. John the Evangelist in memory of whom the church is named. There are fourteen symbolical windows of stained glass in the isles (sic) and sixteen in the clear story representing twenty eight of the prominent saints in the church calendar. These windows were made in London by Hardman and Co. Two reredos and the screens enclosing the boy’s sacristy will be filled with leaded cathedral glass. The confessionals and pews are made of oak.
The interior of the church in all its appointments displays the highest order of architectural design and finish and the effect is grand and imposing.
The organ and choir loft are in a gallery over the entrance, behind which is an immense nave window of beautiful stained glass. The organ is a grand instrument of splendid tone and great power. The ensemble of the organ and nave window is strikingly beautiful. It was made by Harrison of New Jersey and cost $5,000.
The body of the church is lighted with 140 electric lights; around the altar are 110 more, and in the first four arches 120 – a total of 370 electric lights. The church is also supplied with thirteen pendent chandeliers, four uprights, two wall lamps and seven other lamps under the choir gallery, in all over 100 gas jets, to be used should the electric lights fail at any time.
The every day chapel in the rear of the church is fifty feet by seventeen and will seat eighty persons. It is an elegant room with a vestibule at each . In this are the memorial windows from the old church.
The architect of this magnificent church in Mr. Thomas H. Poole, of 246 Fifth Avenue, New York and the edifice in its design and finish is a credit to he recognized ability and correct taste. The builder is Mr. James D. Murphy of 200 Broadway, New York city.
The cost of the building, the furniture and paraphanalia (sic) was about $125,000. As a work of art it is an honer (sic) to the architect, to the Rev. William A. Dunphy of blessed memory in whose mind was born the thought of its creation, and the christian woman whose consideration and kindness provided with the cheerfulness the large means to make real so worth a memorial and so substantial a monument of sacred art. The effect of such a temple of art, as well as a temple of the living, ever-present but invisible God, should certainly be to elevate the moral tone, to cultivate the better nature and enoble and make better, wiser and happier every citizen of White Plains.
Sounds very impressive. Unfortunately, none of the pictures in this post actually show the church (you can see a part of it in the background in the next post: A Garden in White Plains). I was so taken by this quadrangle that I neglected to take a picture of the church itself. The building shown is actually the former school, which closed in 2006. The Alumni still have Facebook pages.
There’s also a book on the church: The Story of Saint John the Evangelist Church – White Plains, New York
Statue in front of the school.
Detail of statue base.
Stations of the cross.
Taken with an iphone 5s.
In the middle of August we went to a water color exhibition at Muscoot Farm. Above, one of the artists with some of her work on the wall behind. She also happens to be one of my wife’s friends. We bought one of her paintings: a landscape featuring a lake scene.
Taken with a Sony RX-100 M3
My wife is very good a discovering things to do and a couple of days ago she came across an event at our local library. It was a demonstration of Korean cooking followed by an actual Korean meal. We both like Korean food so off we went. The event was very well attended and the demonstration was quite informative. After the demonstration a short video was shown, featuring a particular kind of of Korean bronze ware and its remarkable properties (e.g. e.coli bacteria was cultured in a ceramic bowl, a stainless steel bowl and a Korean bronze bowl. Growth in the ceramic and stainless steel bowls was as you would expect. In the bronze bowl nothing grew). After the video came the food. There was a lot of it and it was quite delicious.
Well worth going.
Above a women with a camera. Below the demonstration.
Taken with an iphone 5s (the only camera I had with me).
Fort Lauderdale Florida, 1977. Archival Pigment Print printed 2017 29 1/4 x 37 inches. From an edition of 10. Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery.
According to a press release from the Howard Greenberg Gallery:
TWO EXHIBITONS BY JOEL MEYEROWITZ
BETWEEN THE DOG AND THE WOLF and MORANDI, CÉZANNE AND ME
HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY
September 7 – October 21, 2017NEW YORK – Two exhibitions of photographs by Joel Meyerowitz will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from September 7 to October 21, 2017. Between the Dog and the Wolf presents images from the 1970s and 80s made in those mysterious moments around dusk. Many of the works will be on display for the first time. Morandi, Cézanne and Me surveys Meyerowitz’s recent still lifes of objects from Paul Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence and Giorgio Morandi’s in Bologna. The exhibitions will open with a reception on September 7, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Two new books of photographs by Meyerowitz are to be published: Joel Meyerowitz: Cézanne’s Objects (Damiani, October 2017) and Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself: A Lifetime Retrospective (Laurence King, January 2018).
The exhibition title Between the Dog and the Wolf is a translation of a common French expression “Entre chien et loup,” which refers to oncoming twilight. As Meyerowitz notes, “It seemed to me that the French liken the twilight to the notion of the tame and the savage, the known and the unknown, where that special moment of the fading of the light offers us an entrance into the place where our senses might fail us slightly, making us vulnerable to the vagaries of our imagination.”
The majority of the photographs in the exhibition are from a period when Meyerowitz was spending summers on Cape Cod and had just begun working with an 8×10 view camera. “My whole way of seeing was both challenged and refreshed. I found that time became a greater element in my work. The view camera demands longer exposures, and I began looking into the oncoming twilight and seeing things that the small cameras either couldn’t handle or didn’t present in significant enough quality,” Meyerowitz explains. “What seems of more value to me now, 30 years later, is how that devotion to the questions back then taught me to see in a new and simpler way.”
The exhibition features photographs taken concurrently with Meyerowitz’s iconic series Cape Light, widely recognized for his use of color and appreciation of light. A young woman is perched on a wall that overlooks the Cape Cod Bay in a 1984 print, with the last of the daylight fading into a pink haze. A 1977 view of a dark house with one lit window has a sandy front yard with a sagging badminton net, an abandoned tricycle, and a blue doghouse with peeling paint. In a nearly abstract image from 1984, the viewer can barely see lights from a house on the beach as night falls. Other locations show a view of a serene sky with St. Louis’ Gateway Arch from 1977 and a palm tree in fading blue light in Florida from 1979.
As Meyerowitz notes, “I am grateful that my experience has allowed me to work both as a street photographer and as a view-camera photographer, and that I’m comfortable with both vocabularies. I speak two languages, classical and jazz. Street photography is jazz. The view camera, being so much slower, is more classical, more meditative, it has a different way of showing its content. You can be a jazz musician and play classically, and you can be a classical musician and love the immediacy and improvisation of jazz.”
Morandi, Cézanne and Me reflects Meyerowitz’s fascination with everyday objects, which also served as inspiration to Paul Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi. He was granted permission to photograph in both artists’ studios in 2013 and 2015.
Meyerowitz was struck by the grey walls in Cézanne’s studio, and how every object in the studio seemed to be absorbed into the grey of the background. He photographed just about every object there – from vases, pitchers, and carafes to a skull and Cézanne’s hat. This project spurred him to visit Morandi’s studio to observe the objects that the master still life painter had used as inspiration for over 60 years. Meyerowitz was allowed access to all 275 of Morandi’s famous objects at his home and studio. He worked near the same window, sitting at Morandi’s table, photographing shells, pigment-filled bottles, funnels, watering cans, and other dusty aged objects against the same paper that Morandi had left on the wall, now brittle and yellow with age. Meyerowitz also began to look anew at items he found in Italian flea markets – a dented brass tube, a rusted tin flask, a capped container — and he photographed them placed in grey corners and against heavy canvas backdrops in his studio in Tuscany.
Says Meyerowitz, “My underlying motive – while, of course doing this for my own pleasure – was to provide a catalogue of the objects these painters used in the course of their lives, and show to scholars and other interested viewers, the actual, and for the most part humble, cast-offs and basic forms that these great painters drew their inspiration from.”
About Joel Meyerowitz
Joel Meyerowitz (born 1938) is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world. After a chance encounter with Robert Frank, the New York native began photographing street scenes in color in 1962, and by the mid-1960s became an early advocate of color photography and was instrumental in the legitimization and growing acceptance of color film. His first book, Cape Light (1979) is considered a classic work of color photography and has sold more than 100,000 copies. He has authored 17 other books, including Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks (Aperture, 2009). As the only photographer given official access to Ground Zero in the wake of September 11th, he created the World Trade Center Archive, selections of which have toured around the world. Meyerowitz is a two-time Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of awards from both the NEA and NEH. He is a recent winner of the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Award, its highest honor. For his 50 years of work in 2012, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Lucie Awards, an annual event honoring the greatest achievements in photography. This January, Meyerowitz was inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame for his contribution to the photographic genre. His work is held in the collections of many museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Meyerowitz lives and works in Tuscany and New York City.