Cities based along a body of water lend themselves to night photography. The skyscrapers glow upward from the streetlights below, and reflect their multicolored light onto the water.
The night was just windy enough to gloss over the water, and make for a classic ‘postcard’ shot.
One of my mother’s favorite sculptors is Constantin Brancusi, a good friend of Impressionist painter Modigliani.
My first exposure to Brancusi was in Paris in 1995, where the George Pompidou center had an entire floor dedicated to an exhibit of his work.
When in the Met in New York, I came across this sculpture and his most famous, “Bird,” shown towards the bottom of this page.
This is a shot of UC’s newest residence hall, shot from the balcony of my third floor suite in Sawyer Hall.
Somehow, the building doesn’t seem real. It looks like the computer renderings the University shows to all the prospective students.
The Cobb & Bradley Building, at East 57th and Euclid in Cleveland, was built in 1901 as a hotel, a restaurant, and a hardware store.
Abandoned since the seventies, not even pidgeons reside here anymore – unless you count the skeletons in the window sills of those who failed to escape.
The building is in quite a state of disarray – the sixth story roof is now on the fourth floor. Mick Jagger supposedly shot a music video there in the 90′s, which would explain the piano on the third floor.
I was terribly disappointed when I found out the project had been scrapped – I was imagining living there after I got out of school.
The University’s Engineering Research Center, designed by PostModernist Michael Graves. I always love shooting buildings at night – the lights in the windows just cause them to glow with a vitality that oddly seems asleep during a bustling business day.
I took this shot from the twelfth floor of Daniels Hall
Newport, Kentucky sits just opposite Cincinnati on the Ohio River. It has a certain quaintness that Cincinnati seems to have abandoned somewhere along the way.
Originally, I was driving to the Riverfront to shoot the Cincy skyline, but this house asked to be photographed, with such picturesque lighting. I’m glad that I stopped, for I found some other shots that I would not have had I sped by in a car.
While I was working at a lighting design firm in Manhattan, one of our clients had a gallery on the Upper East Side, and every time he had a new show, we would go to light the exhibit.
Once we were called in to light the work of an English abstractionist John Walker. He came in to see how his paintings looked, and stayed to chat a bit.
A few weeks later, I took a bus to DC to visit my Cincinnati roommate, who was co-oping there. We headed over to the Philips Collection to see the Modigliani exhibit there, and John Walker had a number of pieces in the permanent collection. Here’s an example of one
