Empire State of Mind

Mid-way through having lunch with an eighty-year-old, born-and-raised New Yorker, she leaned in, and told me something I only half knew: “Every day, I see something in the city which surprises me. There’s always something new.” Two very different artists, photographer Jordana Zeldin and (self-styled) ‘humanitarian, artist, filmmaker and photographer’ Sam Bassett both attempt to capture something of the fantastic, fragmentary, and surprising city of New York.

One morning, when taking the subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan, Jordana Zeldin noticed a medical advert for the removal of bunions, which had been defaced with the ‘simple, elegant marking’ of someone scrawling ‘LOL’ onto it. She took a photo with her iPhone, the only camera she had to hand. And so began her eight month Subversions project, documenting snapshots of graffiti over the city, using her iPhone. ‘The iPhone is the tool of the modern commuter,’ says Zeldin, ‘and I wanted to remain a commuter on this project, which became about being a traveller in the city.’ The resulting images are startling in their simplicity and beauty. And, in looking at them, you get the sense that something has been covertly captured, Zeldin focusing in on an encounter between an image and an anonymous person, a fleeting reaction. Instead of staring blankly at an advert, someone has come along and added to it, or torn it away to reveal another one beneath. Such an action could go unnoticed, were it not for the fact that Zeldin has brought it sharply into focus.

Zeldin argues that “to survive in New York you cannot take everything in, so the way I cope with that, photographically, is to zoom in.” In doing so, Zeldin continues a New York photographic tradition. In the 1930s, photographer Helen Levitt (perhaps most famous now for providing the image of a gaggle of street children, used by The Walkmen for the cover of their first album) took images of children playing in the street, or of their chalk markings on the pavements or walls of Harlem brownstone houses. And Levitt’s contemporary (and mentor) Walker Evans was, like Zeldin, a photographer-as-commuter, using a camera hidden in his coat buttonhole to take photos of unsuspecting travellers sitting opposite him. In such a way, Evans, Levitt, and Zeldin in their wake, captured those transitory moments, such as awkward glances between train passengers, that make up a life in a city.

Zeldin cites as her two main influences the two greats of American colour photography, Saul Leiter and William Egglestone. Like them, her work (in Subversions but particularly in a series of dreamy, Sofia Coppola-esque Polaroids) has a particular gentleness to it, the colours becoming intensified yet also, somehow, softened by  late afternoon, East Coast sunshine. Similarly, like Egglestone’s photographs (of diners and porches and people in Memphis, Tennessee) Zeldin concentrates on the little things – her series on Brooklyn Flea Markets could have been taken by the eye of an avid collector, and Zeldin describes the ‘thrill of the find’ in photography, searching for images as you might rifle excitedly through vintage clothes.

Sam Bassett’s work also continually engages with New York, yet in a very different way. A striking figure – over six foot tall, with long blonde hair and a gentle voice – I met him at the Hotel Chelsea (made famous, in part, by Sid killing Nancy, by the two Dylans – Thomas and Bob – living there at different points, and by Leonard Cohen’s immortalizing song, Chelsea Hotel #2), where he is the last permanent resident, living on the rooftop with a view over the lower west side. As we walked around the Hotel Chelsea area, Bassett pointed out various markings that appeared on billboards, wrapped around subway entrances, and hovering on walls. These turned out to be his ‘tape sculptures’, abstract designs he plasters over the city at night-time, trying to lift our eyes up and engage with the landscape. There is something in the grace and movement of his ‘tape sculptures’ which reminds me of the arc of a plane, or of the curve of a ball flying through the air, and so it is not surprising to find out that Bassett has been a private pilot since the age of eleven, nor that he was the captain of the Syracuse University National Championship lacrosse team.

Bassett’s eclectic background explains why his most recent project is so wonderfully eccentric. Seven Feature Films is a project which “seeks to truthfully explore and celebrate America’s rich cultural history of individuality.” In attempting to do so, Bassett has created documentary films about figures and people he knows or came across, only connected by their “underdog-eqsue characters”. When asked to describe them, Bassett started with a story of a figure called Cowboy Stan, who is a “kind of pack-rat East Village character”, and of Bettina, a “great thinker, unknown and unrecognised”. But further than that, he wouldn’t say – the films should speak for themselves. And, in a way, they do: each character is unique, ranging from Bassett’s ninety-three year old grandmother Constance, irate poet Ira Cohen, Viva Stormé DeLarverié who threw the first punch which started the Stonewall riots (which, in turn, launched the Gay Rights movement), to the managing director of the Hotel Chelsea for over fifty years, Stanley Bard. Bassett, through documenting his friends and family, does capture something of the particular brand of Chelsea eccentricity, of the peculiar people you find in a city. Yet, when I was watching ‘Ira Cohen’, even with Cohen sitting a couple of rows ahead of me, I still did not feel that Bassett’s film necessarily captured his subject entirely, instead just showing a brief moment in one person’s life.

But perhaps this is the point, and one of the (sometimes oddly freeing) restrictions of working in a city. Both Bassett’s films and Zeldin’s photographs have the quality of letting you into New York secrets, making the unnoticed – that which hovers in the corner of your eye – appear. As Zeldin says, “if you just pause, or look down to the side, you are probably going to notice something you would not else have seen.”

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