Popped up out of the subway the other day at 125th.street in Harlem and was assaulted by so much amazing culture.  Incredible up there.  Going back with film.

I recently had an assignment from HOUR Detroit Magazine to photograph an up and coming rapper from Detroit while he performed a concert here in NYC.  The rapper, who is represented by the same management team as Eminem, is 100% deaf.  He grew up in a family of musicians in Detroit and has carved out a niche for himself.  The audience that showed up to the gig were almost completely deaf.  Sean uses different ways to get his music, lyrics and message thru to his fans.  First, he signs (ASL) during his performances, transcribing his lyrics.  Secondly, he has multiple screens behind him that broadcast the words.  And thirdly, and most unique, is he brings a large platform that he built and places it in front of the stage at each concert. This makeshift dance floor vibrates to the music so that his deaf audience members, when standing on it, can feel the music.  Sean also, while touring, visits schools before his shows and gives inspirational talks to young people, with and without disabilities.

• Here is a link to the story:
• http://www.hourdetroit.com/Hour-Detroit/May-2013/Deaf-Jam/
• And interview on NPR with Sean: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/01/160343713/sean-forbes-deaf-but-not-quiet 
• Music video: http://deafandloud.com/post/48361336166/we-wanted-to-create-a-crazy-looking-experimental

For the technically interested, this all was shot on a Mamiya 6 on 120 Fuji film that expired in 2004, hence its slightly weird hues and density.

Images from the annual fundraiser for the Archdiocese of Brooklyn at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Images from my work as the official photographer of the Media Council at the Paley Center for Media.

Images from a fundraising event for Scale:Africa, an international non-profit headquartered here in NYC.

The J’ouvert festival recently unloaded itself unto our weary Brooklyn and it now stands firmly, surely, as my favorite annual cultural event.  Starting at 3am, its hypnotic, rhythmic procession of steel drums and motor oil covered revelers snake their way down Flatbush to Empire then head East.  I realized, while standing in the middle of the street drinking a bottle of Guinness as the sun crested the Eastern horizon, thousands of people streaming in both directions, music pounding, people wining (the incredible sex dance of the West Indies), singing, heads deep in religious and spiritual fervor, the air a pungent mix of paint, smoke and oil, that this religious procession is the ONLY time the West Indian community in New York (and many New Yorker’s in general) get to fully express and celebrate their traditions and passions as its riotous behavior unfortunately falls far south of what our puritanical society will tolerate.  [Here is a link to an earlier 2012 post that has more explanations on the holiday as well as digital images and video.]

This post highlights the images which I made on a Holga camera.  The Holga is a plastic, Medium Format camera which in the last 5 years has become immensely popular. It’s the impetus for the Hipstamatic and Instagram apps and the digital filters that they overlay over camera phones images attempting to imitate the Holga’s unique visual effects, namely its vignettes, lightleaks, lens aberrations and general out of focus qualities.  All of which you will see here on film in its natural, smooth, beautiful glory. Look into the corners of images for vingettes, all around the frame for the strange color bleeds and film loading mishaps as well as the selective focus in general.

I actually had a class in college in 1993 where we used this camera as an exercise to make images more from a place of pure artistic creation instead of one hindered by the many technical calculations needed to create high quality images.

And, if you want even more J’ouvert and Carnival stuff, here is my 2011 post and 2010 of the same event.

Photographing in the darkened city of Lower Manhattan was one of the most exhilarating experiences in my 8 years in NYC.  It started as I made it half way across the Brooklyn Bridge around 10pm and had a great vantage point to take in the view of the city with a pitch black foreground and lighted city in the rear.  As I started to descend into the city, it was into complete darkness on the bridge, narrowly avoiding people popping out of the moon shadows.