"They are going to stop and look."

In the video below, Ianthe Dehaney recognizes friends and acquaintances in the mockup photograph of the planned outdoor exhibition of my Newburgh photographs.

Please go to Kickstarter to pledge. The exhibition can only take place with your help. It is an exhibition of portraits of citizens of Newburgh which will be displayed on the wall of The Ritz Theater to pay tribute to the people who live in this lovely place. We welcome, with great thanks, any amount that you can afford. 

Pledges must be made by April 11 to be sure that the exhibition takes place. If you have been thinking about it please act now, and tell your friends that you have done it. They may understand why, and be able to help too.

Ianthe Dehaney recognises friends and acquaintances in the mockup of the planned outdoor exhibition of my Newburgh photographs.

"Exactly what's needed."

Rodney was sitting outside The Wherehouse in Newburgh, across the street from the Ritz Theater where I am plan to display my portraits of the citizenry of Newburgh.
I asked him if he worked at The Wherehouse. "I fill the gaps when needed," he replied. "I am a musician." He is also a decorated Vietnam war veteran.
For details of my appeal for funds to mount this exhibition please go to Kickstarter.

Kalia likes "Newburgh: Portrait of a City"

As soon as I had got out of the car and slung the tripod over my shoulder I turned to see who was around.  I saw her at once. A flash of orange hair, chatting merrily with her friend striding towards us. Yes, she said, she would tell me what she thought about displaying prints on the wall of the building in front of us.

Please visit Kickstarter to consider a pledge for the proposed outdoor exhibition of my Newburgh photographs.

Ruth Claiborne

Listen to Juanita talking about Ruth, the Newburgh bar owner, who spent her retirement visiting the sick.

Please visit Kickstarter to consider a pledge for the proposed outdoor exhibition of my Newburgh photographs.

It's dark inside

What, I thought, goes on inside this pair of garages, nothing to do with cars surely. Outside, ivy falls like icicles, flag stones have sunk but are not yet buckled or cracked, weeds are fairly under control and there are signs that two cars have recently been parked there fairly regularly. A dark mystery inside. Of course, I could have looked.

Please, if you have given this photograph a moment's pause, go to Kickstarter where you will find details of the planned outdoor exhibition of pictures like this to commemorate a time when nobody took any notice of this lovely place. We need your financial help to make and install the mural size prints.

A smile on Broadway

I do not take many smiling pictures but this was irresistible.

She is featured in my proposed outdoor exhibition of the people of Newburgh. This exhibition can only take place with your support. Please go to Kickstarter if you think you can make a pledge. 

Cowboy

The date, 1996, one of the first photographs I took in Newburgh. He is also a photographer,  doing weddings and events. I saw him again a couple of years ago in the same hat.

Please see details of plans for an outdoor exhibition of my Newburgh pictures on Kickstarter.

Engaged couple

Two young men and a young woman were sitting outside their house on one of those glorious days we've been having. I climbed a few of the steep steps that led up to where they were sitting and said that I wanted their views on my proposed outdoor exhibition of mural size prints to be displayed on the wall of the Ritz Theater. (Please see my Kickstarter project.)

Something familiar about the woman kept nagging at me. At first she wanted nothing to do with my quest. She did not want to be photographed and did not want to give her views on Newburgh. "I would not be able to say good things without the bad. Anyway," she added with a good natured look, "I am waiting for a proper proposal of marriage and a ring, before I am photographed with him."

I continued to wonder where I had seen her before. She began to tell me where she thought we had met. It was Williams Street, when she was a sixteen. I had also photographed her friends.

In the end I took their picture, thanks to the gentle persuasion of her fiancé. I marveled at their beauty and style and left them knowing we'd go back and film them when we'd got a decent microphone to update our Kickstarter project

Two days later Caroline got an e-mail from her. This was who she was—13 years earlier. With, as she put it, "Her first fiancé."

Newburgh teenagers

Today I am launching an appeal on Kickstarter for pledges to support the cost of an exhibition of mural size prints (4ft x 6ft). The exhibition will coincide with the publication of my book "Newburgh: Portrait of a City" published by W. W. Norton.

Newburgh lies 60 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. First settled by German Lutherans in 1709, it became in turn the center of the timber trade, the fur trade and shipbuilding. During the 1930s through the mid-1950s it was the great manufacturing town that produced hats, ribbons, handbags and military uniforms.

Downtown Newburgh has fallen from the status of "All American City" awarded by Look Magazine in 1952 to one of the most distressed cities in the United States. It is a city that has never recovered from urban renewal; a city that has been ignored and overlooked for more than 50 years.

The photographs will be displayed on the wall of the Ritz Theater in the heart of downtown Newburgh, through the sponsorship of Safe Harbors of the Hudson, a nonprofit organization that is committed to transforming lives and building communities through housing and the arts.

The outdoor display will allow all the citizens of Newburgh free and constant access to them.

Thank you for your time in considering this appeal. You will find the details here on Kickstarter.

Quiet man

This is Ivan, brother of Jason Ross. He arrived late on that day in Brooklyn when Jason and Natasha found subjects for me. He sat down and hardly spoke. Yet, later when I photographed him, he was the paragon of politeness and consideration.

Felix Salmon and Michelle Vaughan

Of the 15 or so people I have photographed in the carriage house of the Garrison Institute, Felix is the only one who, noticing a number of golf balls scattered on the floor, looked up at the window panes of the floor to ceiling windows and asked, "Is there any connection between the golf balls and the broken panes?" As there is a large lawn in front of the carriage house it is quite possible that someone had been out there practicing their swing.

Nutmeg's friend

She particularly liked our most difficult and bad-tempered cat Nutmeg. Since her visit Nutmeg has been more agreeable. Her mother has a gift with animals that she may have inherited.  

Louis' profile

I have always found it useful to have a stand-in to test the light before the shoot. Sometimes the picture of the stand-in is better than the subject. Here, I think... I'll just say that I cannot remember who Louis was standing in for.

1965 to 2012

Jason Ross asked me to come and spend the day photographing anyone in his building in Red Hook that would like their picture taken. Here are six of the pictures including Jason himself seen here with Natasha Chekoudjian.

At one moment Jason disappeared into his bedroom and came back wearing a Michael Fish shirt and a French Velvet jacket. "They belonged to my father. He bought them when he lived in London in the 1960s." Natasha Chekoudjian is wearing a dress from her own collection with a belt and jewelry designed by Jason.

Scarlet and plaid

Todd Bachenheimer, shirt designer for Brooks Brothers and his friend Christine. At lunch with Jason and Natasha, Christine wandered around with a plastic beaker. It contained a yellowy, clay colored liquid. We asked, "What is it?" 


"Cleanser," she replied. I thought, what more of a cleanser could you want than our lunch: raw carrots, raw celery, chicken sandwich and slices of blood orange with mint leaves.

Two pairs of blue eyes

At first it was difficult to stop them kissing. When they did stop, they were perfect hosts. They put back the blind that had fallen off a window where the sun was pouring in and spoiling my shot, they moved a table to give me more room and they cleared a background of clutter.

She travels to Africa to work, tending to those in need. He is an art director and designer here in New York.

Dancer

Sometimes the camera sees something in a face that merely looking does not reveal.

Ovals amognst circles

Sculptor, Robin Heide Kennedy, of Red Hook, New York and Spoleto, Italy. I particularly liked her kitchen. She made tea for us and we talked about dogs. She has an Italian hunting dog.

Alan Furst

Whatever else you think Alan Furst is good at, to my mind he is a master of the lower-upper-middle-class English staccato voice of the 1930s—the one the mid level Secret Service had in the 1940s. He does, of course, write this voice, not speak it, something to my mind that is difficult to do well because it is riddled with special inflection, threatening and unexpected emphasis, and the use of words that are not quite what the dictionary gives you.

In Spies of the Balkans two Secret Service agents, Jones and Wilkins are briefing Francis Escovil, a junior street operative. Jones explains that they have to clean up a mess caused by a superior and are giving the job to Escovil. Here I quote from the book:


"Somebody with a name?"  Escovil said.

"Oh, we can't tell you that." He stared at Escovil. "Are you mad?"

"I see," Escovil said, faintly amused, which was not at all the proper response.

"Do you." Wilkins said.

Only in England, Escovil thought, could "Do you" be spoken in such a way that it meant "So now I shall cut your throat."   

Yet, Alan Furst is not English, but an Upper West Side American Jew, now Sag Harbor resident. Besides the exciting plots in his books, it is his gift of a perfect ear for different English accents that made me smile.

Kathryn Schulz

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
She writes standing up at her Mac which lies on a bench exactly the right height for her comfort. She likes everything in place before she starts work. Disorder prevents words flowing. 

Everything was in place when I arrived and I felt quite at home. She is very good at sketching and has a floor to ceiling blackboard on which she has drawn a family of leaping frogs. The cat has her own chair placed in front of a window.