Selfie Abuse

I don't do selfies. Technically, I'm terrible at it, all thumbs as to which buttons to push. And there's the fact that I've never learned the art of the fake smile. Even before the advent of the phone camera, I had very few snapshots of myself.

Do you think it's odd that a professional photographer like myself has so few snapshots of his life and travels? I do. And that was the situation before losing the few pictures I had along with everything else in my apartment in Lower Manhattan.

Frankly, I don't understand why so many people feel that they must have a picture of themselves standing in front of every statue on Planet Earth. Honestly, I don't get it.

* * *

I used to photograph celebrities from the theater and music world. In Rome, I worked on the edge of the movie business. Nino Manfredi was the Italian actor I got along with best, a good guy and a great talent. The only celeb snap I've been able to find is this one of Oscar-winning actor, George C. Scott working on his makeup for the role of Abraham in the John Houston film, The Bible: In the Beginning ... 

Below is my most treasured personal picture, my wife Eloise. It's a portrait, more than a snapshot. We were together for 12 years and remained close after our divorce right up until she died. That was just a month before the Mulberry Street fire. 2018 was not a good year.

 

* * *

This will be my last weekly blog for a while. 

I've started work on a memoir about growing up in Brooklyn and I find it hard to tap into the same source (my life) on two different projects at the same time. 

I plan to continue writing and publishing my blog but just once a month. 

Thank you all for putting up with my blah blah. 

Reluctant Nomad

Port d'Andratx on the west coast of Mallorca, a view from where I lived for three months

Patrick is a relative of mine who's created a nomad lifestyle for himself. Since the arrival of the pandemic, I've lost track of how he's doing with that and where he is at the moment. I do hope things are working out for him. He's smart and energetic, and he has skills. 

I've been a nomad many times myself. I'm a nomad now. Before there was the World Wide Web, before there was the ability to work online from almost anywhere, photography and writing and the post office made the nomad life possible for me. 

Travel is attractive and romantic. Everybody likes to travel. It's an adventure—one more hill to climb, one more land to see, one more stranger to befriend. But as a nomad, you're always passing through, never really an pivotal part of anywhere. As the title of this blog suggests, you're a stranger in a strange land.

Winter is lovely and mild in Seville

As an assignment photographer, my main work was in the travel marketing genre. Travel marketing is the stepsister of advertizing. My clients were airlines and tour companies. I would fly First Class to exotic places and stay in lush 5-star hotels. But I was not on holiday, not there to relax and enjoy leisure time. The pleasure I had came from the work I did. And I did enjoy the work, but too often I was on the road alone for two or three months at a time. Back then, I had a home to return to. I was a part-time nomad. Too often, the time I spent at home seemed to be the part-time part. 

Yes, travel is an adventure, but as with most adventures, there's a dark side.  

Liverpool? Am I finally settled in my new home, this port city on the Irish Sea? No, I'm not. I'm still a nomad, still living out of a suitcase. As with Rome, Mallorca, Seville, San Miguel de Allende, Oxfordshire, Montreal, and Washington, DC, I'm not sure that I'll be staying here. 

Cafe 't Smalle, a brown cafe in Amsterdam and a gathering place for locals and nomads 

Strange Indeed!

I need to get into the nitty-gritty of this Strange Land business. 

I bought a DAB/FM radio last week. This is the second Liverpool radio I've bought. The first one just stopped working. I brought it back to the store to see if they could do something. They exchanged it for a newer model, still a DAB/FM. (I don't know what DAB means, but FM means frequency modulation. I'm not so sure what that means.)

Like most people of a certain age, I've owned a number of radios over the years. I like to follow the news or have some soft music playing to absorb the silence. I brought this new radio home and unboxed it. ("Unboxing" is a hip term I learned on YouTube). When I finally got the radio loose of all its various wrappings—they really pack stuff securely these days—I found a 12-page booklet, an instruction manual. I thought . . . why do I need an instructions manual for a radio? You turn it on, tune it to the station you want, and listen.  

I thumbed my way through the 12 pages. The type was tiny and a faded pale grey in color. Even with a magnifying glass, I could hardly read it. And I couldn't understand it. This booklet needs its own instruction manual. 

So far, I've only managed to get one station to play, techno-dance music that keeps repeating the same phrase over and over. It does get my old toes tapping though. 

Digital, could you step back a bit please? Stop chewing on my leg! Give me a rest from some of this stuff!  

Twenty-five years ago, the Internet showed incredible promise. And today, I love that I can pay for things with a tap of my debit card. I love the fact that I can Google most anything I want to know. I value the universal speed and convenience of email. I can do everything online now except hug a friend, pet a dog, or consume food and drink. 

But the way they keep asking me for yet another piece of information to identify myself is maddening. Didn't I do that yesterday . . . and the day before? I don't remember my mother's dog's maiden name! And I don't want to download and learn yet another version of some app I've been using that had no visible problems. Instead, why don't they do something about battery life? 

I was so upset by all this, I had to walk down to share my thoughts with Eleanor Rigby. Tommie Steele left her sitting on a stone bench about a block from me. Nell listened quietly but offer no advice. Well, she has troubles of her own. 

Let's hope I'm in a better mood next Sunday. I'll close with a positive image of Liverpool, one that I captured a year ago before the virus arrived. It was a simpler time.

 

Happy Feet

When I first arrived in Seville two years ago pushing everything I owned along in one large piece of rolling luggage, I had no slippers. Slip-on bedroom slippers, I mean, the kind most people wear around the house. I had a pair in Little Italy, but along with a lot of other things, they got left behind. My guitars and keyboards synthesizers were left behind. I hum a lot now. All my vintage film cameras, lenses, all those things we photographers use to help us take pictures, all left behind. Many boxes of color slides, audiotapes, and disks with the music I composed, two unfinished novels, and a nearly finished memoir, a closet filled with clothing, my furniture, kitchen utensils including a costly set of quality knives. All gone.

And, as I said, my slippers. 

Is the loss of the things that represented my past a great tragedy, a reason for self-pity? Not so much. Before the fire, I was thinking of selling the lease on my rent-stabilized Lower Manhattan apartment and moving out of the city. The fire made that happen.

I was planning to do digital conversions of a few hundred slides, my favorites. That would have been a lot of work that I now won’t have to do. The clothes would not fit the new thinner me. The furniture? Charity shops would not take that stuff. My efforts as a novelist and composer and performance musician? Those things were important to me for a time in my younger days. Looking back, I picture those areas of endeavor as large, bright rooms that beckoned, that I entered with enthusiasm, crossed, and then exited. I may still write the memoir. After all, I know the story. I still write and I still do photography. 

That will have to be enough.  

In Seville, I made a new friend—Velina from Florida. She is a super person, full of energy, very helpful, and for some unknown reason, she became involved in helping me find a suitable pair of slippers. Velina was helpful with many more important things (she speaks Spanish) and we had lots of enjoyable lunches together. The hunt for slippers didn't work out. 

She would text me or call and tell me she had seen some slippers I might like in a little shop just north of the Parasol or down by the Tower of Gold. I would go and look but there was always something keeping me from buying. Was the Spanish size right? Is that my color? Often they were just too fancy or too costly. So I never did buy slippers in Seville.

And I've also done without slippers in Liverpool this past year. Today I solved the problem. Here are my new slippers. Okay, they're not exactly new. But that's not a bad thing. They're old and worn out, but they're comfy. They're familiar. They did their job as shoes and now they will have a second life as slippers.  

Can wearing slippers help us avoid the coronavirus? I hope so.

 

Those Mod Fashions

I fear I've been lagging a bit behind, fashionwise. I've always been a step or two out of step with things. In the '60s, I had long hair but I was never a hippie. "Don't trust anyone over 30," they used to say. Since I'm now over 80, I'm guessing I still don't qualify for trust. 

I woke up this morning with a germ of understanding as to where current fashions in Europe and the USA originated. TV and films, of course, those superheroes and sci-fi flicks . . . and 14 years of the Kardashians. Those are the main culprits. The K family's show is coming to an end. All that the world will be able to see in the future is about another 14 years of reruns. Out of step? Me? I guess so; I've never seen the Kardashians show. 

I worry about the heavily tattooed. Making a style adjustment from that won't be easy. But not all tattoos are bad. This nice Liverpool lady below allowed me to capture the stylish, tasteful bird she has on her back. Notice how the color on the bird's breast matches her hair color. 

The first time I'd seen someone heavily tattooed, head to toe I mean, was at Speakers Corner in London. That was about 1966. I was shooting a magazine story called The Sounds of Hyde Park. It's interesting that the tradition continues, even if the subject matter of the speakers has changed. 

There are many "speakers" on the streets in the Western World now. In Liverpool, they come as buskers, religious zealots, vendors, and simple beggars who just sit silently and hope for a donation. Here's one busker who works a Liverpool high street and shows up in a different outfit every day. The man can't carry a tune in a bucket but that doesn't stop him from sharing his painful attempts with us.

Even traditional Muslim women have added the most common new fashion accessory to their wardrobe these days—the face mask. Nice. I like that touch of blue amid the somber black.

Fast Food

Too fast or not fast enough? And what's the hurry, anyway? Taste and nutrition are what we're after. Where have those important things gone in the equation? 

Tomatoes are grown and picked to ship now, not to eat. Most chickens are unhappy prisoners in an overcrowded space. Their taste makes me unhappy. I paid real money for a wedge of  Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's tasteless and dry and hard as a rock. Pecorino Romano? Forget it. I've been forced to put an English cheddar on my pasta! The ghosts of the Caesars will haunt me. 

They now call fast food "street food." It sounds hip and jazzy. It doesn't improve the taste though. Real street food is sold on the street, not in a restaurant. Is street food healthy? Maybe some of it, maybe none. 

Liverpool is not a great restaurant town. It's better with traditional pubs but that's less important to me. San Miguel de Allende, a much smaller place than Liverpool, had far better bistros. It's not Lyon or Bologna, but I was impressed. In San Miguel, when you order guacamole, they make it from scratch. I also found better restaurants in Montreal, Lisbon, Seville, Galway, and even in Sligo. 

But Liverpool is a distinctive city of almost a million people and I've been here for a year now. I've found more than a half dozen places I like. Of course, the pandemic lockdown has not helped things. 

I've been alternating between three breakfasts at home—the one above with berries, yogurt, walnuts, and a broken-up muffin, and the one below, with scrambled eggs, ham, and a muffin. My third was pancakes with fruit. I've stopped that last one; too much sugar and too much white flour. 

Oatmeal used to be the top dog in my breakfast kennel. But I can't get the preps right in this miserable, little kitchen. I fear an oatmeal explosion of some kind. I hope to work things out.

* * *

I'm sure everyone keeps up with the International news regarding the coronavirus and the financial crisis. Here's the latest on Liverpool's partial lifting of the lockdown and my life on the periphery.

Shopping scousers are legion now. On the high street, they are buying and looking to buy again. Security will not let them into the shops if they're not wearing a mask. Bistros are different; you can't eat or drink with a mask on. 

Businesses here and everywhere have already been closing. More will follow. And Whitehall has yet to make a deal on Brexit. I went up to the City Council Office on the top level of St. John's Shopping Centre Friday to pay my tax. It was closed and a security guard told me it would not be reopening in the future. Oh my. I'm trying to give them money. Now I have to figure out how to pay my taxes online. 

 

My Kitbag

Ah, yes—the cameras, and lenses, and other bits and parts we use to capture images. Our kit. I have a simple point of view towards photography equipment: if I can work without it, I don't buy it, carry it, or use it. But our kits are the tools we use as photographers, so I've always bought the best stuff I could afford. It's hard to do a first-rate job with second-rate tools. 

In the past, I've owned Nikons, Leicas, Hassieblads, Rollies, Bronica's, Mamiyas, a Linhof 4 by 5, and a Deardorff 8 by10. The Deardorff I owned for about a week and used it only once. Then I sold it. Someone made me an offer I could not refuse. These days, I use only smaller, lighter mirrorless Sonys. It would be nice to have larger files to work with, but my Sonys produce images that are fine for what I shoot now: editorial stock.

I've owned primes, zooms, wide angles, ultra-wide angles, telephotos, teleconverters, perspective-control lenses, and almost everything else. Strobes with umbrellas and portable flash units with bouncers and defusers and confusers? Yup. 

A friend asked me what focal length lens I use most. That would be 24mm. With the pocket Sony RX100 series, I might crop a frame sometimes, and I usually make use of the perspective control tool in Adobe Lightroom.  

Camera supports? Of course. I have a Silk Pro 804 carbon-fiber tripod with me, and two ball socket heads, a Bogen, and a Leitz. It's a little on the short side, but it's useful. Gone now are my larger tripods, table pods, and clip pods. An extra I did buy was the UPstrap-Pro. Those straps are much more secure than the strap that comes with your camera. I still have an UPstrap on my Domke shoulder bag.

When I set out on this endless journey two years ago, I could not find the bottom folding half of my wonderful Leitz tablepod, damn it!

But enough about me and my stuff . . .

Here's what's been happening this past week with the ongoing gradual opening up of the Liverpool lockdown:

There were a billion and a half people walking around Liverpool City Centre yesterday. Some wore facemasks. Others did not. On the street, I steer clear of people but have my facemask on my chin at the ready. I pull it up to cover my mouth and nose when I go into shops. I do not go out late at night and rub shoulders with party-minded rugby-type beer drinkers. 

At my advanced age, if I get the virus it will probably kill me. But at my advanced age, something is going to kill me. I have no plan to live forever.  

I don't have a dog or a cat or any furry creature that I can scratch behind the ears. I've sort of adopted this young herring gull as my pet. It hangs out on the marque of my building looking lost and confused. Like all the birds in Liverpool, it's hungry. I talk to it and try to encourage it to fly out over the Irish Sea and catch a fish. But this gull is not smart and it doesn't seem to understand me. Maybe it's my New York accent? Someone told me it's against the law to feed the gulls. I plan to feed this bird anyway. 

Gulls are often thought of as flying rats. But in fact, they are an endangered species. I'm trying to work out what's the best thing to do. I know I can't save all the gulls; I'm just focused on this one bird, what it can eat, and what it should not.

Editorial Stock

Editorial stock photography is a retirement game that I play in my senior years. I don't do it for the money, although I welcome any money I earn for doing it. It's what I do instead of playing golf or tennis or watching daytime television. 

I work with a combination of three sets of rules—those of the marketplace, those of Alamy, my stock photo agency, and my own. Mostly, I stick to these rules. But rules are meant to be bent and sometimes broken. 

I'm a city boy. I don't have a car or a driving permit anymore, so I can't do landscapes. I don't do flowers or wildlife either. I see only pigeons and gulls and some other smaller birds where I am now. When I lived in Oxfordshire, I would sometimes see hedgehogs. There is something lovable about those little creatures. I had a family of them living in my badly tendered garden in Woodstock. There were voles, too. But I don't see these small mammals here in the center of Liverpool.  

I don't like to capture pictures of beggars or homeless people, although I sometimes do. It was impossible for me to resist snapping this man from Senegal with his dramatic posture. More often than not, I want my stock photos to have an upbeat, positive message. It's the message that makes it stock. If you can write a caption to an image, positive or negative, it's stock.

Instead of begging, this senior Chinese woman in Lower Manhattan collected cans for recycling. She was focused and hardworking with courage and a positive attitude. I used to say hello to her in Mandarin, and after a while, she gave me a little smile and a nod. I hope she's been okay in the lockdown. 

There are a lot of unexciting subjects that work well for editorial stock: signs, marquees, storefronts, statues, products, and people doing most anything. 

And then there are landmarks, of course. Landmarks can be tricky. Everybody snaps away at landmarks. Alamy has 125,039 images of the Manhattan Skyline, 71,792 of Big Ben. 

I do okay with stock sales of landmarks, with one frustrating, inexplicable exception: St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. I have what I consider some really good images of this most famous church on Earth, yet I've never had a sale or even a zoom. (A zoom is a closer look by a potential buyer.) 

It seems that I've repeated some things I've said in earlier blogs. I'm sorry about that.

Social Distancing

Last week I said that I'd begun to eat out again. Have you? Or are you worried about social distancing? 

I'm pretty good at guessing a person's height. I'm rarely off by more than a half-inch. So I think it's odd that I'm having trouble estimating the prescribed social distancing space of 2 meters. I know that that is roughly six and a half feet. The supermarkets and other businesses have distances marked out on the floor. But are they the same? Are they consistent? I don't think so. (Of course, I'm an American, and Americans don't use or understand the metric system.)

And what about the layouts for tables in restaurants? To me, they look like their closer together than 2 meters, both indoors and out. Here's a shot I took of Gino D'Acampo on Castle Street a few days ago. 

Two meters? One and a half? What do you think? 

I had my second mushroom pizza of the month at Rudy's next door to Gino's yesterday. There was lots of room where I sat inside in the cool. Scousers and tourists alike were sitting outside in the bright sunshine. Italians wouldn't be caught dead eating a meal in the sunshine. And neither would I. 

These two mountain village Italians seem to understand the concept of social distancing.

And let's not forget that in 1918 we were visited by another pandemic.

Recipe for Food Pics

Food is a large part of the common-access, editorial subjects I capture for Alamy. I estimate that a quarter to a third of my stock photo library deals with food. That includes people dining out, farmers' markets, items on supermarket shelves, and closeups of meals. Editorial stock photography is the only shooting I do now that I'm semi-retired. 

With the lifting of the Lockdown here in Liverpool, I've started eating out again. In this past month, I've had lunch out once or twice a week. Recently, there's a 50% government discount on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays which makes things almost affordable. 

A Pizzeria in Lower Manhattan

I have a friend who is a leading assignment photographer in America. She does wonderful studio shoots that often involve a chef, a stylist, and a few assistants. It's beautiful work. Me? Well, I don't do that. 

Instead, I aim at that place somewhere between studio-controlled images and casual snapshots. The meals I'm photographing are the meals I'm about to eat, and I'm usually hungry. I'm not shooting coherent sets of pictures or full restaurant menus. Each image I upload must stand on its own. 

Caprese Salad

I work fast, getting three classic frames: overhead, diner's view, and a closeup. Mostly, I use the light from one window. I don't ponder shots or look for "creative" angles. The props, the extras, are always utensils, napkins, and other things found in all dining areas. Food, I feel, is about taste. If an image tweaks your tastebuds, it's successful. If it doesn't, it's not. Simple, eh? 

At home, in summer, I like to fix myself a large plate of mixed, multi-cultural antipasto—some Italian, some Mexican, and a little Greek, Indian, or Middle Eastern. Tasty and healthy food. But for stock photography, simpler subjects work better. 

Green Beans on a Green Table

And famous, popular dishes seem to work best.  

A Cheeseburger and Fries

Street

That's "street" as in street photography, meaning candid images that illustrate the natural environment with an emphasis on meaningful activities. Mostly that's people doing things, but Elliot Erwitt did five books on dogs doing things that would certainly qualify as "street." 

These days, I do a fair amount of street shooting myself, but the emphasis is on editorial stock (street for stock). An image is editorial stock if it suggests a caption to me. I want to shoot more street, more unplanned people pictures, but trying to find people doing

Henri Cartier-Bresson pioneered the genre of street photography. He viewed his art as capturing the decisive moment. He used small 35mm Leica cameras. The new phone cameras and pocketable digital mirrorless cameras have given street photography a new lease on life. Is everybody a photographer now? No, just 94.6% of us.

Soon after HCB came Walker Evens, Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Vivian Maier, and others. The full list, even just my favorites, is much longer. It does not include Magnum's, Bruce Gilden. Bruce is at the top of two of my other lists: Obnoxious People and Total Assholes. Magnum has seen better days.

Do you think Boris reads my blog? He did backtrack on his "normal by Christmas" statement after I made fun of it last week. So maybe . . . maybe. . . . Nah. 

 

Aging

Someone on the BBC today warned against "pining for the past and cringing from the future." Good advice. Dealing with the present is hard enough.

A dear friend in Tuscany had a bad fall this past week. I will not suggest she is aging (ageing in the UK). In my day, it was not polite to discuss a woman's age. But her dog seems to have gotten very old. This faithful canine is blind, deaf, and unsteady on his feet—all four of them. He was the accidental cause of my friend's fall. It's not just humans who suffer as they age. 

Whatever your species, your years are numbered, and the later decades can be hard. My own sense of balance has diminished greatly in these last few years.

The buildings, sidewalks, and roads here in Liverpool are aging too. During the lockdown, landlords and the City Council have been working to repair them. 

The Prime Minister suggests that old folks should slim down. His advisors say it will give them a better chance if they have to deal with the deadly virus. So far, no fines or arrests have been mentioned. I'm older, Boris, but I'm thinner than you are.

I lost my extra pounds six or seven years ago. I did it by intermittent fasting, the 16/8 program. And I've stayed with the program. I eat only breakfast and lunch in an 8-hour window. I don't eat junk food, and I don't need to count calories. Oh, and I usually have a drink or two with my lunch. So far, alcohol has not been a problem. But if my doctor were to suggest that I stop drinking, I would make a change.

I'd find a new doctor. 

A Step Towards Normal

(This blog got lost because of a tech problem with Blogspot.)

I had a Pizza Margherita with mushrooms and a schooner of Italian lager at Rudy's on Castle Street at lunch on Saturday the 4th of July. The 4th is Independence Day in the United States. Here, it was the first day of the partial lifting of the lockdown. 

I sat inside. The tables were set far apart and the staff all wore facemasks. There was a family of three Italians with a toddler a few tables away who looked as if they were enjoying themselves—they lifted my spirits. Everything inside Rudy's went smoothly, but there was an elaborate confusion at the entrance where I had to do strange things with my iPhone that called for an extra pair of hands. In the end, this rigmarole seemed pointless. 

After lunch, I walked up to Bold Street to see what was happening there. Bold Street is shoulder-to-shoulder restaurants, bars, and coffee houses. The entire street is now closed to traffic. Several of the more popular bistros had tables outside. Unfortunately, it was raining and only one place had those large umbrellas. 

I was not able to go back to see how they did at dinner, but I will take another look at lunch today. 

A year ago Thursday, I arrived at John Lennon Airport in Liverpool on a Ryanair flight from Dublin. If I had been seeking adventure instead of security and tranquility, this would have been a great year. But, after trying to figure out the various local ways of doing things and straining to understand the local dialect, out of nowhere, came the coronavirus followed by the lockdown. And now there's the very real threat of a major world depression. You can't make this stuff up. 

In New York, Sunday brunch is an important social event. It runs from late morning far into the afternoon. Midday today, there were not that many people out on Bold Street looking for Sunday brunch. The sun was shining and most of the bistros were open but only about a third of those had tables on the street. My guess (and it’s only a guess) is that management is being careful; they’re not sure if the new social-distancing system will work. 

Also, there’s a glaring fact about Bold Street that occurred to me today for the first time. There’s nothing attractive about the place, this long line of restaurants on both sides of this long, narrow street. I’ve not been there after dark, and I guess that’s when most people go. Colorful lighting should improve things. Yes, I took pictures today. I don’t like a single one. 

I see many working hosts in shops and restaurants wearing face shields now instead of face marks. Medical experts are not in lockstep as to which provides the best protection.