Zach Barocas, Diasporist Diarist
This was probably 2018. I spent a fair amount of time shooting on the subway that year. I’d pick a destination, usually a specific neighborhood, and grab whatever I saw along the way. It was a difficult year for several reasons and I found real joy in situations like this: musical, quotidian, everyone sort of doing their own thing without stepping on anyone’s toes. Ideal city life. Always a comfort and inspiration.
Driving east on the 29 Palms Highway from Desert Christ Park [footnote]a place surely worthy of its own post and gallery another time[/footnote] to the northwest entrance to Joshua Tree National Forest,[footnote]also and still in need of a gallery and post here.[/footnote] I passed two roadside installations, what I thought were shrines, that I turned around for.
The first was quite elaborate and dedicated, as far as I could tell, simply to Christ and children. There were no names or images, no additional icons. It was quite striking, isolated, well-maintained, unattended. Definitely a shrine.
The second was less explicit in its religiosity. There was a smallish cross wrapped in satin ribbon tacked onto a wreath of undetermined material, but that was the only adornment to be found on this structure. It was, a far as I could tell, not a shrine, but rather a small shelter, about 4 feet high and 8 feet across. No more than 3 feet deep, it could easily have sat two adults, or laid one out for rest, protected from direct rain or wind or sun.
These photographs were taken on a two-day road trip almost exactly four years ago. These photos stand in for memories I can’t otherwise conjure and have, in effect, become what I describe above, a shrine and a shelter. But who knows what their function was? I live in Brooklyn, New York City, where almost nothing like either of these micro-environments is to be seen at all. I wonder now, too, if they’re still there, or how, exactly, given that I didn’t really know where I was, but only where I had just been and where I was going, I could find them again for a second look?
Which question, of course, can’t be answered with certainty. But the photos do their work, and offer some sense of what I saw, what was where I’ve been.
Over the last few decades, high-income housing has replaced much of what was a kind of West Side light-industrial-transit-and-transportation corridor, roughly extending from the Holland Tunnel to the Lincoln Tunnel: countless parking and service garages, body shops, Hansom cab stables, unofficial taxi hangouts, bus lots, and even gas stations were to be found from the West Village up to the Javits Center. Most of them are gone now, yielded to more profitable development.
Maybe all the taxis hang out in Long Island City now? And the Hansoms, under probably-worthy scrutiny from animal rights activists, are going the way of their ancestral horses and carriages. I don’t have any particular nostalgia for these things, but I do believe that for a time, mostly in the last century, they contributed to the character of the City, if not its glamour or broader appeal. In any case, the shop pictured here is still around, across the street from a Hansom stable, and I won’t be surprised if it and the stable are gone the next time I’m over there.
There’s a wonderful scene in Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-Ga where he visits a model food manufacturing facility. He’s discussing the difference between things and the images of things.[footnote]A pretty hot topic at the time and something we should no doubt be paying closer attention to right now.[/footnote] This is my small contribution to that mode, seen on the street in Manhattan.
A friend had just played Radio City Music Hall. My wife and I were waiting for him on 51st Street when the reflection caught my eye.
Cadman Plaza, Downtown Brooklyn, NY.
I don’t know what happened to this car. I used to see it on the street occasionally but haven’t for a few years now. The day I made this photograph was hot and damp, humid following a late-summer shower or storm. It was a perfect day for a shot like this, the hazy warm light, the blue tint of the auto glass and paint.
