Blog About Photography

Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tion seg­ment from New York: A Doc­u­men­tary Film

I wrote a cou­ple of posts sev­eral years ago about New York’s Penn Sta­tion, and that var­i­ous other Penn Sta­tions that existed along the East Coast (1, 2). I’m still think­ing about Penn Sta­tion, par­tic­u­larly now that I work just around the cor­ner from its gravesite.

Pho­tog­ra­pher, friend, and all-​​around standup guy Ben Alper has updated his site with some new work. Give it a look.

Pho­to­graph by Ambroise Tézenas

I dis­cov­ered the pho­tog­ra­phy of Ambroise Tézenas today illus­trat­ing an arti­cle in The New York Times Style Mag­a­zine about the lin­ger­ing colo­nial lifestyle of Euro­pean ex-​​pats in Tang­ier. The story itself is worth a read, and the pho­tographs accom­pa­ny­ing it com­pelled me to Google Tézenas’ name and land on his portfolio.

Tézenas’ work along­side this piece is a per­fect exam­ple of why the Times – Style Mag­a­zine or oth­er­wise – con­tin­ues to lead in terms of the the qual­ity of its pho­to­jour­nal­ism. The sam­pling of images in Tézenas’ portfolio evi­dence a mas­ter pho­tog­ra­pher deeply con­cerned with the state of the world, focused on jux­ta­pos­ing it’s some of its more con­flict­ing features.

The sprawl­ing dic­ta­to­r­ial plazas of Turk­menistan, almost entirely devoid of peo­ple, may just depict, in an instant, the pri­or­i­ties of the régime there. As may the richly detailed images of Chi­nese work­ers, hud­dled together dur­ing their lunch­break, in the densely pop­u­lated areas sur­round­ing the Olympic Zone.

I have never heard of Ambroise Tézenas before just now, but clearly the Times has been pretty famil­iar with him. Given the con­cerns evi­dent in his work, choos­ing him for the Tang­ier piece makes a whole lot of sense.

“Here is a pow­er­ful argu­ment for writ­ers’ burn­ing their papers — you’d like to be remem­bered for “The Inno­cents Abroad” and “Life on the Mis­sis­sippi” and the first two-​​thirds of “Adven­tures of Huck­le­berry Finn” and not for excru­ci­at­ing pas­sages of hero wor­ship of Gen­eral Grant and his son Fred and accounts of your prox­im­ity to the gen­eral and your busi­ness deal­ings as the pub­lisher of his mem­oirs, which only reminds the reader that the gen­eral wrote a clas­sic auto­bi­og­ra­phy, and you tried to and could not.”

Gar­ri­son Keil­lor, writ­ing in yesterday’s New York Times.