One of my most powerful and influential muses both in my writing and photography is incongruity. I believe this is the case for two reasons. First, growing up gay in mid 20th Century America means you daily face living in a state of perpetual incongruousness. Almost every thought you have is incongruous with your surroundings and the apparent thoughts of most everyone around you. Your self-confidence, self-respect and development as a human being depends on embracing and owning your state of incongruity. As a child and especially as a closeted teenager and college student I was often called a non-conformist and an iconoclast. That was unfair to true non-conformists and iconoclasts because I did not choose to be so whereas they do. What appeared to be non-conformity and iconoclasm was merely the manifestations of my incongruous condition.
The second reason for my creative relationship with incongruity is Manhattan, my life-long environment. Environmentally, my home town provided a visual and cultural stew that celebrated and exploded with incongruity. As a child and closeted young man, I could swim in the waters of Manhattan with complete confidence and comfort. Who would notice my quirky little self in this ocean of intensely complex cultural, economic, political, racial and ethnic diversity and this visual cacophony and feast of discordant shapes, colors and textures?
So incongruity became my home and my muse.
I believe that New York is as important to the art world as it is because this city”s uniquely incongruous nature drives an unequaled atmosphere of creative energy and frenetic industry. I was recently asked why I “limit” my camera to New York. In fact, I almost never travel with my camera. My inventory of Manhattan photography is vast. And having traveled extensively throughout more than two dozen countries and countless cities and towns, I have but a few hundred old transparencies buried in a drawer somewhere.
The reason is that my muse is a very demanding mistress. Paris is a city of harmony and balance. London delivers an abundance of quaint, stately and a touch of the eccentric. Tokyo is an avalanche of uniformity and elegance. Bangkok is an ocean of golden spires. Amsterdam’s incongruity lies in the sexual antics hidden behind sparkling clean windows and compulsively neat little houses. But if I photographed these places I would feel like an adulterer.
For many reasons: Chance, the forces of chaos, competing cultural perspectives, subconscious manifestations of the city’s demographics–Manhattan’s is the queen of incongruity. My camera’s appetite for it seems never to be satisfied by the cornucopia of inharmonious diversity of architecture, styles and design. New York never disappoints in that regard. In most any direction you look in most parts of town, you will find bizarre, often inappropriate and jarring juxtapositions of lifestyles and perspectives that should make for one big jumble of chaos but instead it is in that brazen incongruity that the city finds an amazing visual harmony.
Tourists are often jarred by this as they discover that a wrong turn on a city block can transport you into an entirely different world after merely walking a few feet. Other than the city’s famous grid pattern, little else has been done in concert thanks to the egos and individuality of very wealthy men and the American habit of borrowing architectural styles and ornamental designs and decorative effects from several thousand years of human history which is no where more apparent than in this city.
On one city block you may catch glimpses of ancient Babylonia, Classical Greece, Medieval Europe, Art Nouveau Vienna, and Renaissance France. Some of these will be bizarrely newish, some aged through recent neglect and other parts deliberately made to look weathered over hundreds or even thousands of years. In fact, one of the most charming characteristics of this great lady with a passion for phallic symbols is that it is often impossible to differentiate between neglect and artful and deliberate antiquing.
I will be quite content to spend the rest of my life exploring this town’s details. I consider myself to be extremely lucky to have found a model who remains timeless, always changing and forever surprising. My work is completely a product of my environment. Incongruity. Except Manhattan is also the glue that holds it together, and I mean “it” in every sense of the word.
To a great extent, Richard, this post answers the question I asked earlier: “What do you do to rekindle your artistic energies?”
For you, I see Manhattan is your muse. At one time, it was simply outdoor scenes in wild places that did it for me. There is something to be said for art that is an exchange of viewpoints rather than an internally generated. The former refreshes, the latter exhausts.
As an interesting observation, a few years ago I collaborated on a comic book. It was a dark, urban fantasy based on a mythical city involving rifts between alternate worlds and time warps. All my drawings were based on Manhattan at at various periods, and it was the very incongruities you speak of that made her such a perfect model. I would have considered a photo collection such as your a perfect means of drinking in the city. Don’t be suprised if your collection ends up being useful to other artists.
Incongruity is a powerful attention-grabber; our perceptual mind seems to be seeking it. Beyond that focusing of our attention, do you feel there is a common message or perhaps messages in your work relating to congruity/incongruity? In your first image the two shop windows seem to nicely enhance each other because of their contrast in tone and color. In the second the two main buildings seem to go well together in a complementary way despite their stylistic difference, one red with yellow trimming, the other yellow with red trimming. The third strikes me as more jarring (though I like the scene and especially the composition), and the fourth as almost disturbing, suggesting that falling brick might shatter the smooth glass. Do these different emotional reactions make sense to you? Were they (or others) at all calculated on your part, or more just a matter of my particular take on things? Is incongruity good, bad, or indifferent in itself?
Two of the major themes that I hope to convey through my work are 1. Finding the unity and beauty in incongruity, and 2. Finding the beauty through composition, color and light in what most people might see as mundane or even ugly.
In the first photo I was struck by the incongruity of a 19th Century Village landmark coffee and tea shop next to an extreme 21st Century gay S&M leather store, two radically different histories of Christopher Street coming up against one another so dramatically. The incongruity of two very different traditions.
In the second there’s the obvious incongruity of two cultures and architectural styles coming up one another and yet, as you say, unified through color and line.
In the third scene I was struck by how three radically different styles of architecture, three widely disparate decades and three very different histories came together in such a comfortable compostion.
And the fourth photo delights me in that a spanking new high-tech 21st Century design Chinese Embassy stands next to a 19th Century wreck of a building that seems barely able to stand. The old people subbornly refuses to succumb to modernity and progress. And the new building is stopped dead in its tracks by the obstinancy of old age and private property.
For me incongruity is a fact of life and one I’ve learned to embrace and love. And I think there’s always a message and a story in incongruity and that’s a very good thing.
I can relate to this … I could swim in the waters of Manhattan with complete confidence and comfort. Who would notice my quirky little self in this ocean of intensely complex cultural, economic, political, racial and ethnic diversity and this visual cacophony and feast of discordant shapes, colors and textures? . I felt similarly in the midsixties when I exchanged my German environment that made me suffocate for Manhattan.
Last year, I went to the shop in the first photo searching for my favorite tea, Earl Grey by Jackson Piccadilly. Elas, they too had run out of it as this tea is no longer exported.
Birgit, I have an entire tin of Jacksons of Piccadilly Earl Grey tea sitting on my kitchen counter. Are you saying that I can fetch top dollar for it on ebay? I’ve just checked on line and indeed they have disconntinued Earl Grey! Why would they do such a foolish thing? Off to ebay!
Richard,
We discussed this earlier — why you are tending to not photograph people. Your answer is that photographing a city landscape is always about people. Fair enough. It seems to me that for the topic of incongruity, you have a wonderful subject in the physical moving people of Manhattan. Perhaps a photo of a person would add a nice touch of incongruity to your incongruity series.
Is it true that Earl Grey is finished? I can hardly believe that.
Richard,
Nice statement. Thanks!
Richard,
I suppose a city without visible people is also an incongruity.
Still, your writing is always very personal in tone, and especially interesting for that reason. I find it, not odd, but curious, that you are not more interested in the living human element of the city. Your writing is self portrait. The photography is, to use June’s term, about the Other. Why?
I love observing people.
Isn’t that someone partially hidden behind the tree hurrying past the Leather Man? Isn’t that a person inside on the top floor by the fire escape taking a moment to enjoy some sun? Isn’t that someone across the street behind the curtains? And the last one… what a monument (of Near Rubble)!
This work, though, is not about specific people; instead it is about us all and how we all fit in, in various sort of ways.
I switched to Earl Grey from Taylors of Harrogate which I can only buy in Cambridge and occasionally on Broadway but not where is live in MI. I now buy a kilo on line and put it into old my old Jacksons of Piccadilli Earl Grey cans.
OK, you people needers. Hope this holds you for a while (see above). More next week.
Richard,
The photos and post both made my day.
I have a theory that we learn by comparisons — and what is incongruity but a comparison of unlikes. So observing the last photo with that soft smoosh of sherbet colored clouds next to the cracking brick beside the wall of glass — well, I almost swooned. Or maybe I was just ducking the falling brick, as Steve said.
Like Birgit, I felt your description of finding a place to be anonymous a familiar tale.I went from a backwoods hill community to Syracuse, where I thought I’d gone to heaven. No one knew me or cared and it was delicious.
It’s obvious how NYC can be a lifelong passion and endless source of visual and intellectual material. But it seems to me that any place that we really inhabit could also serve. One might not observe through the lens of incongruities, but there are many others that would serve also. In Portland, I see a small city that’s really a big town. It works off that middle America observation of personal space (we all will cross to the other side of the street to avoid encounters with our kind if it’s possible) crossed with a delight in tacky homliness (plastic ponies tethered to old horse hitching rings; found art objects like hiking boots, as yard art). Just my sort of place, as New York seems to be yours.
Richard, excellent post, both the writing and the photos. While Manhattan is, of course, incongruity on steroids, I wonder to what extent your choice to photograph there, and not during your travels, has as much to do with the difference in mindset between being a visitor and a resident as it does w/ the lack (or smaller amount) of incongruity outside NYC.
Your visitor vs resident point is well taken. When I travel as a visitor, I find that my camera intrudes on the experience, especially when I’m in my collecting experiences as a writer mode.
Great post and images, Richard. Incongruity is a word I can sink my teeth into, like juxtaposition and dislocation. I relate wholeheartedly to your love of being a quirky kid unnoticed in the “ocean” of NYC that you so poetically described. In fact, I would venture to say that many of us end up in the arts because we love this kind of sea of complexity, discordant images, sensations, ideas, questions. This rings more true than the uniformity and predictability of a suburban subdivision.
Richard,
Garrison Keillor on the Writer’s Almanac http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
today has a poem called “Goodbye, New York,” by Deborah Garrison. While it’s a poem about a lost love, her characterization of New York made me think of you: a few lines —
“You were the pickles, you were the jar
You were the prizefight we watched in a bar
the sloppy kiss in the basement at Nell’s
the occasional truth that the fortune cookie tells
Sinatra still swinging at Radio City
You were ugly and gorgeous but never pretty
always the question, never the answer
the difficult poet, the aging dancer…”