Commentary &Photos 08 May 2011 08:05 am
Creepers – PhotoSundayRecap
For today’s PhotoSunday, I’m recapping something posted back in July of 2008. This is one of many I did back then in which I took some pride. I’ll have to get back to photographing my streets of NY. Now that the weather is warming up a bit, I’ve every encouragement to do so.
- There was an excellent documentary on PBS this past Thursday. It was called, “Home.” Perhaps it was just local channel 13/WNET that aired it. The show was a documentary about New York from the vantage point of outsiders who’d moved here. The director, Alan Cooke, interviewed lots of celebrity types; Frank McCourt, Liam Neeson, Alfred Molina, Rosie Perez, Mike Myers, Colin Quinn, Susan Sarandon and Woody Allen offered choice comments throughout the show.
Malachy McCourt, at one point, said that the City was cold and difficult. Even the sidewalks were cold, hard concrete. Yet in these sidewalks there were always cracks with bits of life shooting up from the least likely places.
Wall-E offers a world of no vegetation, and we have to accept that premise. Yet, reality shows us that nothing can cede the bits of green from stopping in the coldest of extreme. George Carlin once said that styrofoam was not going to destroy life on earth. It was just going to stop HUMAN life on earth. He speculated that perhaps humans were put here specifically to invent styrofoam so that the earth could continue after all humans died off using styrofoam for whatever it needed. Even the devestated Hiroshima and Nagasaki have already recovered from the nuclear onslaught some sixty years ago. Grass grows there.
Here are bits of grass, life and plants creeping out from the least likely places.
(Click any image to enlarge.)______________
To me, it’s more likely that 700 years after the humans left earth,
the planet would have looked more like the photos below.
on 08 May 2011 at 12:21 pm 1.steve fisher said …
Michael: Many of your images look quite surreal. Italo Calvino’s short piece ‘The Soft Moon’ is must reading while viewing these photos. Check it out at http://des.emory.edu/mfp/calvino/calsoftmoon.html. Enjoy. Steve.
on 08 May 2011 at 3:58 pm 2.Michael said …
I’ve always loved Calvino and have read most of his work. Your sister, Max, introduced me to him.
on 08 May 2011 at 6:31 pm 3.Bill Benzon said …
Yes, yes, yes!
I’ve been having a ball photographing the irises in the islands on 11th street in Hoboken.