Walking New York

The sociologist William Helmreich has written a book about walking every block in New York City.   It's about 6,000 miles, apparently.   That's like walking from New York to San Francisco and back, and more.  It took him four years of fairly steady walking to walk every block.  There are others, apparently, with the same goal.   An enticing idea, though at my age and with my knees, not a feasible one for me.   The book is a very interesting sociological study of New York, based on the experience of walking the streets, talking to people, and observing the scene.
My goals in walking, though, are not sociological.  I just like getting to know the different streetscapes and getting a feel for the contrasting neighborhoods in the city. You can do that without walking every street, fortunately, and I also feel free to choose only the neighborhoods and streets that interest me.   Which, actually,  is pretty much everything.   (Many years ago, during an extended stay in Paris, I tried to do the same thing in Paris, marking each walk with a blue marker on a large Michelin map of the city.  There is a lot more to Paris than the central Haussmann designed streets.)   I enjoy both getting to know a bit about each neighborhood and looking at things to photograph.   I enjoy seeing the architecture both beautiful and ordinary, residential and commercial, and the way people have created (or not created) their environment.   The photographs I have been taking, though, are not taken as a documentation of my walks, but rather as records of my various visual obsessions.    Many of them give no clue about the neighborhood they were taken in.   I am more interested in color, shape, and the juxtaposition of disparate things.   I love how the camera takes a three-dimensional scene and flattens everything to two dimensions.  The photographs are not necessarily "abstract" because they are actual photographs of real things.   But, I suppose, the photographs aspire to the condition of abstract art.  You could also say they are about finding beauty in unexpected places.

Here are some of my favorites from the last six months of wandering in New York City and parts of New Jersey: