redoing the past

Midway through the 1960s I was looking for a career change. I enrolled in a commercial photo course given by a school in New York's financial district.  Toward the end of the program, I bought a boxy case to hold the matted photos I had made during the course, and I took that on job interviews.  I did get a few job offers, but the ultimate outcome of the undertaking was that I decided I did not really have much of an aptitude for a career in photography.  I did learn some useful things about photography, however, and I liked the pictures I made from that time.The negatives from my photo school days were all lost over the years, but I did hold onto my portfolio case with some of the mounted prints I had kept.

I was nearly ready for retirement when I finally got back to doing some more photography.  I shared some of my early digital work on Photo.net and I decided to make some copies of my New York pictures to put on line as well.  At the time I did not want to cut up the big matte boards on which I had mounted several projects, so I just made digital pictures of the individual photos using a primitive Epson digital camera.  That seemed a good idea at the time, but looking at the pictures on Photo.net years later I saw that the images were very small and of rather poor quality.

I decided that I would like to have some better digital copies of my early work, so I set aside my nostalgic qualms about cutting up the mattes so that I could copy the individual prints on my Epson flatbed scanner.  The outcome would have been better had I held onto the original negatives, but the new digital copies are quite a bit better than the ones I made originally with the little digital camera.  The photos in this series were made with a Nikon S rangefinder camera.  The film was likely Tri-X.  The pictures were shot over a period of several weeks on the streets of New York's Chinese community.

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nyc

The City of New York recently put over 800,000 historic documents and photographs on line.  The site immediately crashed due to the load of visitors, but you can get a preview of the offerings from the Madrid newspaper, El Pais.  A larger selection of images is available on the Atlantic In Focus page.

Most of the photographers were city employees; one of the best was Eugene de Salignac who documented the city, including the building of the great bridges, from 1904 to 1934.

UPDATE:
I was able to access the NYC image collection on May 1st.  It took a while to load the opening page, but the site then seemed perfectly responsive.  A search with the term "Salignac" turns up over seven hundred of his photos.