Personal Surveys

Providence

The Photo Comp

Little Essex Street

Personal Calibration

2001: 52 Sundays

The Crosses of the
Northern Neck

The Wild Dogs of
Jersey City

Personal Calibration

For Christmas, 1995, I received a point and shoot camera. It was a Yashica T4, was weatherproof, had a Zeiss lens, had a waist level finder, and could be had for $200 dollars. Often I wished that I had a camera with me as I went about my daily routine. Once, on West Fourth Street, I observed a cockroach dragging a lit cigarette butt across the sidewalk. I started to carry this camera with me wherever I went. Personal Calibration is a result of the raw data that I was able to collect as I wandered around New York City, went to and from work, ate in restaurants, drank in bars and rode the subway.

Some of the things I have been able to ascertain and judge are:
Only men sleep unprotected in public.
People of all races go missing.
Gin is my liquor of choice.
African American and Latin women have fancy nails.
What was once a technical miracle is soon a piece of crap.
The Psalms are very popular.
If you see your image on a TV, you are drawn to it.

Sometimes, briefly, New York City reveals its true nature. In that brief instant it shows itself for what it truly is: a swirling, chaotic maelstrom. All New Yorkers subconsciously understand this. We are able to lay only the thinnest veneer of reality between the storm and ourselves, so we can conduct ourselves day to day. We need to ascertain, we need to rectify, we need to standardize, and we need to adjust. Those who cannot, find sleep or heaven.

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