Description of My Current Fieldwork

This is perhaps of some interest. I should note that I find a project by doing some work on something that comes up, and then I realize that if I work much more in that direction, I have systematic project.

MK

My October 2017 photographs         

31 October 17

I have been photographing on the streets of Los Angeles and New York City: in part, around NYC Subway stations (as a class project, I have students photograph around LA Metro stations) to learn about what is called “transit oriented development;” in part to invert the New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham’s (    - 2016) project of photographing fashion on the streets of Manhattan, that is, to photograph non- or un-fashion on the streets; and, in part, to document fairly systematically what there is for me to see. I have not been seeking iconic photographs. Rather, I want an archive of some of the life on the streets and on public transit, that is the public life. The difference of Los Angeles and New York City, or Manhattan and central Los Angeles (from the Pacific, to the 405, to the 710, from just north of downtown to South Los Angeles) are readily apparent, Los Angeles lack of intensely-used mass transit (except by youth, the elderly, the disabled, and the less well off) and the ubiquity of the automobile–and the consequent forms of urban development.

My earlier work has been to document storefront houses of worship in Los Angeles, people at work in industrial Los Angeles, the Port, County Hospital, and the swapmeets that dot the region, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, … . Many of these projects were supported by external grants to USC. Much of this work is archived in the USC Digital Library. http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/search/searchterm/krieger

            As for my current work, there are thousands of photographs (the archive itself has tens of thousands), many surround sound recordings of the ambience or people talking on the bus, and videos and three-dimensional photographs.

            The most recent work, in October 2017, was in New York City. There are “crews” of young men or of young women, some going home from school, others just hanging out; there is the flow of people along the street, having been bunched up by traffic lights and then released by the green; the private life in public, whether it be people on the cellphone, or in intimate embrace, or having a sense that no one is watching them. The photographs allow for close analysis, much as in the work of Margaret Mead and Paul Byers (and their work on gestures, when people are interacting in groups), and of Ray Birdwhistle (and his notion of “proxemics”). Each photograph allows for a close reading, to say what is going on and how people makes their claims as to what is going on.

            “Sardining,” as in very crowded Subway cars or at bars when they are most patronized (say during the World Series) is common, and most people develop ways of being very close yet not violating their neighbors’ spaces. Such sardining may take different forms in other cities or cultures, and perhaps is sometimes absent in others.

            It is true that there are some streets that are particularly dense with people, often at almost any hour (14^th Street and Union Square, for example), but such density is not restricted to Manhattan. There are shopping streets in Queens (as in “Asian” Flushing, or Greek Astoria) or Brooklyn (8^th Avenue Chinatown, 86^th St where it intersects Bay Parkway) that are quite dense, with flows of people, goods, and activities. Los Angeles has some comparable streets, but they are rarer (yet think of Santee Alley, Alvarado just south of Wilshire, or the various Latin American ethnic enclaves on Beverly Boulevard). And there are tourist streets, or effectively “invented streets,” like Rodeo Drive from Wilshire to Little Santa Monica. 

            I have not photographed the disabled, the homeless, the idiosyncratic or peculiar. Rather, almost all of these people pass as ordinary and what is commonly seen as normal.

            Moreover, the flows of people are coherent, reflecting going to work, getting out of school, shopping along a busy street, flooding out of the Subway in Flushing to get to buses to other parts of Queens.

            What you see on the streets is meaningful, not so much random as complex and multi-causal. The flows often intersect each other, much as would two streams of molecules flowing out of ovens at 90 degrees from each other; or, on the mezzanine of a Subway stop that has several Subway lines meeting and offering free transfers, people emerging from one train, combined on the platform and then emerging as a flow from the up-escalator or a stairway, now splitting into different flows (and combining with flows from other sources such as the street or other up-escalators or stairways) to other trains and their “down” stairs.