"TIDAL GLITCH" is an aerial photography series by visual artist and fine art photographer Jan Erik Waider. The images capture tidal sand patterns in Iceland, formed as water recedes during low tide.

“I moved to the Upper West Side in August, 1978, and immediately loved it with all my heart,” writes Stephen Harmon, a retired lawyer who first lived on New York City’s West End Avenue and 73rd street. “I am a photographer and set out to preserve it on film because I knew the look of the people and streetscape would change over time forever.”

Stephen’s love of photography began when in the 1960s he saw Walker Evan’s 1931 photograph of Saratoga Springs’ Main Street and said to himself, “Nothing will ever look like this again and thank God that guy took that photo and I’m going to be that guy who takes those photos.”

After this album of photos, we hear from Stephen in a great video from 2018.

 

 

Off-Track Betting was on 72nd St, just off Broadway. Upstairs was Off-Price Clothing. In the 1980s, you could eat at Mrs. J’s Sacred Cow (established 1947) and Cherry restaurant, and grab some cheese blintzes at the Royale Bakery on 72nd Street…

Stephen Harmon took hundreds of pictures of the Upper West Side in the 70s and 80s and thankfully he still has many of them. We’ll be posing more of his fantastic archive here.

His work is displayed in many of the city’s museums, including The Museum of the City of New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The New-York Historical Society, and The New York Public Library.

 

 

“When I was photographing the streets, the people, and the businesses in those bygone days, I was trying to capture on film and preserve forever, I hoped, the look, the feel, the very essence of the time and place. Nostalgia was not foremost on my mind; I was photographing the current day. Today, it seems the results are triggering happy memories and people are enjoying them, and I am very glad.”

– Stephen Harmon, via West Side Rag

 

 

“Before the advent of OTB, betting on a horserace was illegal, except for bets placed at the racetrack. Not everyone could get to a racetrack, so every neighborhood had a bookie, or several, who worked the illegal operation usually from a legal neighborhood business, such as a candy store, or a grocery, or a diner. Sometimes they used violence to collect on a wager.

“TB was started for two primary laudable purposes. First, to provide a government-authorized venue for placing non-racetrack bets on horse races, and, second, to raise revenue for NYS, which took a percentage of the wagering. Why OTB failed in NYC is too complicated for me to discuss… By the early to mid 1980s, OTB parlors were considered by many to be unsightly and unpleasant (many did not have toilets in order to dissuade customers from staying at the OTB for hours), and the clientele was considered by non-bettors to be unattractive, lazy or just unsavory. I, however, did not see it that way.”

– Stephen Harmon

 

 

 

“The streets of the Upper West Side that I walked in the late 1970s and 80s were a delight to behold, awash with color and character attributable in great measure to the people who lived by them.

There were shopkeepers who sold flowers and fruit in front of their stores. There were shoeshine men who set up buckets of flowers on the sidewalk. There were jewelry and hat sellers hawking their wares in different places and ways. There were hot dog carts, ice cream sellers, and other food vendors. And there were the sounds of the buskers, singing and playing instruments, all on the street. What a wonderful time to live!”

– Stephen Harmon, via Upper West Side Rag

 

Stephen Harmon: An Appreciation

The post Disappearing NYC: 1980s Store Fronts on New York’s Upper West Side appeared first on Flashbak.

“The bus stops are disappearing so fast. If I come back a year from now, they could be gone, demolished, or rebuilt. These pictures may be all that’s left in the end. I want to give them some kind of immortality.”

— Christopher Herwig, Photographer and Soviet Bus Stop Hunter

 

Photographer Christopher Herwig noticed the strangely familiar and expressive bus stops as he explored remote parts of the former Soviet Union in the Baltic countries, Russia, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. You can see his work in Soviet Bus Stops and Soviet Bus Stops Volume II and at Fuel design.

As Jonathan Meades writes in the first book’s forward, the Soviet empire had a “taste for the utterly fantastical”. The bus stops take in a vast range of architectural styles and aesthetics, materials and decoration, welcome breaks from the autonomy of Soviet centralised planning and functionality.

 

Herwig began his project in 2002, when he shocked by the price of a Ryanair seat from London to Stockholm to opted to make the journey by bicycle. To break things up he photographed something interesting every hour. “It wasn’t until I got into the Baltic countries,” he says, “that they jumped out at me. Within the first 50km of Lithuania, I noticed these peculiar bus stops everywhere…

”Some were totally mad. It seemed like each had its own completely unique personality. It began to make me realise that, behind the iron curtain and the cliches about the Soviet Union that we grew up with in the west, there were millions of individuals daydreaming and pushing the limits of creativity.”

 

Herwig set out to find the designers on these eye-catching waiting spaces:

“The designers were difficult to find, especially at first,” he says. “It got easier as the project became more popular and folks were more willing to help us track them down. The most famous designer we managed to interview was Zurab Tsereteli, a Georgian artist who has had a hugely successful career and whose art continues to sell well to this day. He had paintings of Richard Gere and De Niro in his studio, and still actively designs large city monuments, some of which are controversial.

“The others we tracked down were super welcoming and sweet and really opened up as we spent more time with them, especially Armen [Sardarov] in Belarus… He told me that the bus stops were not just an opportunity to draw a sketch, but also had philosophy and poetry behind them, which aligned with his concept of how a road should be built and how a bus stop fits into its environment.”

 

 

“In many Soviet architecture universities, the bus stop was one of the students’ first projects and an opportunity to create something never seen before. Since it was considered a ‘minor architectural form’, it was not seen as threatening to any major ideological value – rather, it was encouraged as a medium for artists to have fun and bring pleasure to the people.”

– Christopher Herwig

 

Lead Image: Soviet bus stop in Aralsk, Kazahkstan. Photography- Christopher Herwig

The post The Wonder Of Soviet Bus Stops appeared first on Flashbak.

Born 1924 in the province of Frosinone and raised in Turin and Rome, Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni made his film debut in 1939 at the age of 14, but did not seriously pursue acting until the 1950s, when he made his critical and commercial breakthrough in the caper comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street (1959). He became an international celebrity through his collaborations with director Federico Fellini, first as a disillusioned tabloid columnist in La Dolce Vita (1960), then as a creatively-stifled filmmaker in 8½ (1963).See more »

There are many ways to make an image appear alive and active. In this tipster we're sharing some tips and tricks for capturing movement on film, including camera settings adjustments, experimenting with different cameras and photography styles, and more.

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