The Tenth Anniversary of Pictures From A Taxi

November 24th was the tenth anniversary of my street photography blog, Pictures From A Taxi.

You know, New York could be called a street photographer's heaven.  People of every description, things that suddenly jump out at you from their secret hiding places, profound oddities, dogs, the occasional coyote... this city is just begging to be photographed.

I decided to start carrying a digital camera (with a hefty zoom lens) around with me in my cab in 2006 for several reasons.  For one thing, it would make my already adventurous profession even more interesting.  Instead of just waiting for the light to change, I am scanning the the sidewalks for a shot.  A second reason was because with digital it is so much more doable than it had been prior to that revolution in the world of photography.  No more waiting for your film to be developed.  Instant editing that would have taken hours in a darkroom.  And a third reason was because I wanted to add "mass" to the "significance" of this blog, which is mostly text without many pictures.  Instead of just publishing random shots of New York to accompany the posts here, I thought it better to create a whole new blog of nothing but photographs.

That was ten years ago.  For quite a few years I was publishing a new picture virtually every day, so the quantity of pictures has really added up.  There are to date exactly 2,220 posts, each consisting of simply a picture, or maybe two or three if it was warranted.  There would be many more, but let me tell you something about street photography -- you've got to be really fast!  For every shot I got there were ten I missed because I didn't have enough time to pick up my camera and shoot.  Things happen very quickly out there, plus I'm often moving myself (although I'm proud to say that on some occasions that has not prevented me from getting the shot).

Recently I completed a rather massive project of indexing all the pictures in the blog by subject matter (which I should have been doing all along).  So if you click on the label below each picture you will see other pictures with the same theme.  And of course if you click on the picture itself it will blow up in size, quite possibly revealing details you may have missed in the smaller version.

What I have decided to do to celebrate this momentous occasion is to pick out my fifty favorites from all these images.  Since November I have been re-publishing one photograph a day from the collection, a picture that in my own opinion is one of my best.  (I apologize in advance to all the pictures that were not chosen.  You know I love you all, but let's be honest, some of you are just not as good as the others.)

So I hope you'll click on over to Pictures From A Taxi to check out the ones I've chosen -- in no particular order, my Fifty Favorites.

Man Bites Dog

Way back on June 3rd I received an email from Antoinette, a researcher at a Dutch television program called Man Bijt Hond (Man Bites Dog), asking if I might be interested in participating in some broadcasts they were planning to do in New York in early September. I was told that Man Bites Dog is a long-running show that's on the air five nights a week in the Netherlands and that they'd be coming to the city to commemorate the discovery of New York by the explorer Henry Hudson 400 years ago. Someone had the idea of including a segment about a real New York cab driver as an unusual angle for a story and they found me right here at this blog. Filming would take place during the first week of September for shows that would be on the air in Holland from Sept. 7th through the 11th.

You get five minutes of fame, right? I realized I've only used up about a minute of it when I was interviewed on BBC Breakfast back in November and so I still have about four minutes left on my account! I said "yes".

Thus began a long series of emails between myself and Antoinette that culminated in a plan: I would show up at the crew's hotel in the Flatiron District in a taxi for three consecutive nights; the cab would be outfitted with special lights, sound equipment, and cameras, and I myself would have a microphone attached under my shirt; I would meet with Cas, the interviewer and cameraman, and Pepijn, the sound man; and the three of us would cruise around Manhattan for three hours each night in search of material that could later be edited for the show.


And so I became part of a real television production.

Pictures:

Antoinette

One of the crew setting up a camera angle on the big star of the show

Cas, the cameraman and interviewer, with the hand-held

Crew member setting up the back seat camera

Passengers shared the back seat with sound man Pepijn

On the second night Cas set up this camera on the hood of the cab

Cas, "NYC Gene", and Pepijn

Video clips from the show:

http://www.manbijthond.nl/fragmenten/net-talkshow

http://www.manbijthond.nl/fragmenten/taxichauffeur-schrijver

So how did it go? Mostly it was great fun. And quite flattering that such attention was being paid to me. I will admit to feeling a bit of vindication in the sense that taxi driving is normally a relatively anonymous occupation without any group support. Many things happen that you wish could be witnessed or acknowledged by others. So it was gratifying to finally have that happen in such a big way. They told me close to a million people watch this show every night.

It was also a learning experience. We accumulated more than 7 hours of footage. From that only about 8 minutes of material were actually used. So I learned something about the power of editing. Unless the person being interviewed has some kind of agreement that he has approval rights over the final cut, how he is portrayed is very much in the hands of the editor, or the director via the editor. In this case, I didn't think the material about my personal life was relevant or particularly interesting and I thought the bits at the end of the segments were pretty lame. I wouldn't have included them.

On the other hand, I thought my comments about taxi driving and the interactions with the passengers were presented very well. We had to get the know-how down about getting people to come into the cab, by the way. We found that passengers hailing us from the street didn't want to get into a cab with two guys in the front and another guy with odd machinery in the back. So what we eventually learned was that it was best to park the taxi in a busy night-life area and then Cas would go out on the sidewalk and solicit volunteers. Plus offering a free ride didn't hurt.

My favorite sequence with the passengers was the one with the screaming actress. I should point out that the video she had been in earlier that day was a spoof of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. I think an impression may have been given that she had been in the original, which was not the case. Also the decibel level of her scream was not given justice in that shot. It was much louder! Unfortunately, my comment of "I think you broke my windshield!" was not included. She nearly did! Her name, by the way, is Mika Henderson and she can be contacted at www.myspace.com/sugarnspikes should anyone reading this be in the market for a superb screamer.

Another thing that was left out was that the girl who was with the guy who was so enthusiastic about the celebrities I've had in my cab surprised us, when she learned that the show we were doing was from Holland, by speaking Dutch fluently! It turned out she is from Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America. I thought that was pretty amazing.

So there it is. Cabs Are For Kissing takes to the airwaves. Hope it brings some smiles.

New Blog!

Ladies and Germs, may I have your attention please?
Announcing my new blog - Pictures From A Taxi.
I do a lot of "street photography" while driving my cab - most of my shots are taken while waiting at red lights. Originally I thought I would include some of these pictures in this blog (Cabs Are For Kissing), but now I think that rather than post pictures that have nothing to do with the text, it would be a better idea to start a second blog that would be just photography. It will be one picture every day from various sections of New York - a city, by the way, that is like heaven for street photography.
Your comments are welcome, of course!
Hope you will visit often for a dose of New York as seen (literally) through the eyes of a taxi driver.

Pictures From Ground Zero, 9/11/06

Each year on the night of September 11th the "ghosts" of the Twin Towers appear at Ground Zero as twin columns of laser lights that shine upward into the sky as far as the eye can see. It's a starkly beautiful remembrance of the buildings themselves and of the events that occurred there. Driving my taxi around the city that night, I took some shots of the lights from various vantage points and wound up stopping at Ground Zero at 3 AM to pay my respects.

From 5th Avenue as it enters Greenwich Village.

An artsy kind of shot taken from the 59th Street Bridge.





The source of the lights turned out to be from the roof of a parking lot above the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

Ground Zero is four blocks in length. The gargantuan pit can be viewed from behind a fence on the Church Street side.

The one person I knew who perished that day was Debbie Paris, the wife of my old friend Jim Marrash. I remember Debbie as a caring and lovely person.

One of the items displayed on the fence surrounding Ground Zero was this collection of pictures and messages from children in an elementary school in California. It contained this bit of advice...