NYC: Remastered

A new look at old photos

I became interested in photography as an art form when our son, Ben, moved to New York in the fall of 2009. He was making his Broadway debut in the revival of “Ragtime,” and my wife and I split our time going back and forth from Northern Virginia to the city.

One of us would take care of him three or four days a week, working from the Manhattan apartment, while the other went to the office and took care of our two girls at home.

Between rehearsals and performances, life in New York was broken into blocks of time. Often it made no sense to go back to the apartment, so I would take my laptop and work from a coffee shop before picking Ben up for a lunch or dinner break. Walking through the city’s streets, I started seeing things that reminded me of my late father, a onetime visual artist who had died two years before. He had never been to New York, although he talked of the city often.

As a sort of tribute to his memory, I started taking a camera with me while walking Ben to rehearsal a mile from the apartment or the show in the theme park known as Times Square a few blocks away. I started trying to capture images I thought my dad would have liked while learning more about the city I came to love.

Over the three-plus years we had an apartment in New York, I took thousands of images with an old Canon that today would be equivalent to an iPhone 10. Almost completely self-taught, I learned by doing. My only true method was trial and error (mostly error).

When I started sharing the images to my Facebook page, friends encouraged me to continue, saying I had a good eye for it. What they didn’t know about those first images was that I was trying to channel my father; in some ways I still do.

A couple of years ago, I started going back to those images, wondering if what I took then would meet the standards I have today. I knew the vast majority wouldn’t, either because of composition, my old camera’s technical limits, or not knowing how to process images properly. 

I did, however, find a number of photos I liked, all taken between December 2009 and November 2011. Much like every piece of music from the past is being remastered and repackaged, I decided to do the same with these. Why not re-edit them and see if they would stand the test of time? I think they do.

Welcome to NYC: Remastered.