- 01 NEW YORK | Times Square
I was staying nearby and found Times Square a fascinating place to ramble for a couple of hours. This image is part of an Emperor-sized poster that dwarfed its surroundings let alone the sidewalk people. The contrasting scales, the simplicity of the image and the intense blues and blacks demanded a response.
- 02 NEW YORK | Times Square
An open-topped tourist bus had stopped against part of the poster and I took some shots incorporating other vehicles. Changes to the traffic signals produced a break in the flow and a clear view of the Circle Line advertisement. I was struck by the way in which the boat graphics, the passengers and the baseball player seemed to merge and create a single two-dimensional image.
- 03 NEW YORK | Times Square
There are gaps where lower floors of buildings are visible and raising one's eyes brings a building skyline into view but the oversized hoardings dominate the senses. These central panels were rather gimcrack in construction but carried illuminated and programmed changes of image and information. The sidewalks were crowded with people passing or stopping at an outdoor café.
- 04 NEW YORK | Times Square
I passed a dimly lit entrance to an amusement arcade with this front-of-house couple caught in an area of thin sunshine. I would have liked to venture past them into the gloom but time was short and the brashness of the street beckoned.
- 05 NEW YORK | Times Square
In the first few hours of day one I had been struck by the amount of building work underway in the city, not to mention the turbulent traffic flows that cabs could turn into a yellow river. Large trucks in transit or parked-up and working were a common sight. I liked the contrast between the curves on these two vehicles and the angularity of the advertisements beyond.
- 06 NEW YORK | Times Square
I wanted some tight and low-key compositions that concentrated on vivid colours and eliminated as much of the sense of depth as possible. I liked the complex details surrounding the central figure seemingly looking at its mirror image.
- 07 NEW YORK | Times Square
This was one of many displays of constantly flowing and changing text and imagery that could be seen around the Square and I liked to observe from a distance and then close in to see the individual "pixels" that created them.
- 08 NEW YORK | Times Square
People were sitting on the raked seating more for somewhere to lunch rather than to watch a performance and here they provide a measure to assess the scale of the displays. I liked the contrast between the street furniture clutter and the bold Pop-art shapes and colours of the images.
- 09 NEW YORK | Times Square
These corner boards ran a sequence of images and plain text (see 12) that included this pair on a scale appropriate to an image memorialising the leader of a one-party state. The moire-like effects created by the lighting points are more visible in the photograph than I remember in reality.
- 10 NEW YORK | Times Square
Some of my hometown streets are single lane and some are two. Crossing five lanes of traffic from one sidewalk to another was energising, as was the aural and visual accompaniment.
- 11 NEW YORK | Times Square
Assembled abstract letterforms convey meaning to those who are fluent. Fragmented, they move closer and closer to pure abstraction. Light striking this facetted cylinder created variations in the basic blue and the disintegrated name of the bank seemed appropriate to the times.
- 12 NEW YORK | Times Square
This is one of many subjects that, with hindsight, I wished that I had spent more time recording. Looking at the website of one New York photographer who has spent ten years roaming the city with a camera does put my three days into context.
- 13 NEW YORK | Times Square
I like this view as a contrast to those I sought out to reduce to two-dimensions. Arranged in a climbing perspective, the layers of vehicles, the box corner of the displays and the slot exposing a building behind just happened to compose themselves as I waited with camera poised.
- 14 NEW YORK | Times Square
A windowed cylindrical building carried a sequence of advertisements, with this view the best one allowed by crowding street signs and lamp standards.
- 15 NEW YORK | Times Square
I was drawn to the vertical changes in detail size in this composition, from the tops of walkers' heads below to the large rectangles of window glazing and images above. The contrast ranges from black to white, the colours are only slightly more saturated than in reality and the long lens compresses perspective.
- 16 NEW YORK | Times Square
Heading away from the Square, I was confronted by this arrangement of boards across the corner of a street junction. The angled planes of the posters and the fragments of the buildings behind seemed to come together as one surface, enhanced by the low key saturated colours of the image.