JHS class of 1928

My father attended the Germain School of Photography on the G.I. Bill after WW II; there he learned all kinds of photography skills: the history, the how-to’s, darkroom skills and camera repair. He worked, doing camera repair, in my parent’s bedroom after his regular job as a shipping clerk. He had an ad in Popular Photography for his little business, Precision Camera Repair. The cameras would come in limping and he would fix them. My job was to take them to the post office on East 14th Street (Manhattan) to be shipped back. This is an area around my home: Stuyvesant Town.

When children are exposed to new ideas at a young age, they are forever influenced: I was. I studied after my job as a teacher at The New School For Social research, a college, resurrecting the feelings of awe I had as a child. I’d bring my father’s pre-WW II Leica to work at my school, photograph teachers and students, then develop the film in the night class.

During my second teaching sabbatical in 2001-2002 I worked on a book of poetry (which I published about seven years later), and, a video to illustrate one of the poems. The video was constructed in a year long class of digital imaging. We used Adobe Flash/shockwave, programs which are no longer supported. At the time, I couldn’t let go of my PC: that actually gave me some issues to contend with in later years. I always wanted to see the video again but couldn’t. I spent a good part of last week searching for the old files. I had purchased a CD drive to play the discs but they weren’t recognized by the Mac. Because of operating system differences, the Mac couldn’t read them from the CDs and I almost threw the discs away in frustration; I wasn’t sure where the files were.  So, I pulled out an old PC. I had built the files on my PC laptop in that class almost twenty years ago,  it had a built in CD drive and was able to find about ten files in different iterations of the creative process. I was able to then load them onto a flash drive and then onto my Mac, but they still were not able to be played.

I researched the problem and found a free software, Elmedia, which was able to play the Shockwave files: my video consists of two linked files. However, I was at a standstill, totally baffled. I did what I usually do, I called apple and eventually made it up the ranks during a call of several hours, to a creative person in Missouri and I am forever grateful; she figured out how we could make this project work. It was a brilliant solution.

Essentially she accessed the file, by using “open with” Elmedia and played it while recording it in a newly found sub program of Vimeo: screen record. The files were saved and uploaded to my Mac’s iMovie. She showed me how to edit. I saw the video for the first time in many years. However, after careful inspection, a day after our session ended, I realized that there were unacceptable artifacts: flying cursors and a spelling error: we had uploaded a discarded version.

I spent the last two days choosing other files, reloading them, viewing them, recording them, over and over, until I got it right, until finally, I got the correct files and taught myself, after researching, how to crop them. Essentially what you are seeing is a movie of a screen shot, so there is loss of resolution, but, finally, I am OK with releasing it.

I can’t tell you how good achieving this, made me feel.

Sometimes you have to accept 95%.

The photos you’ll see were taken by my dad during the late 1940s, the early 1950s at the East River, near East 14th Street where we lived, and in the now what is called the Flat Iron District, around East 23rd Street, Broadway and 5th Avenue. I believe the building you’ll see is where the toy centers were. The people at the bottom of the stairs are about to ascend to the Third Avenue El, an elevated train that travelled north, through Harlem and to the Bronx; it was phased out in the early 1950s and terminated in 1955.

Don’t click, just let ‘er rip!

As the film was initially comprised of two linked parts, there is a photo that says “click”. Don’t click on dad! It will stop the video. In fact, you’ll also see brown arrows that used to advance the screen don’t click on them either. It should run on its own, just be patient. I adjusted the speed so you will hopefully be comfortable reading the poem, which is from my book, The Cerebral Jukebox. Just pause if you need more time.

Patience is exactly what was reinforced during this exercise.

Patience can yield art.