NYC Nights 11

After a year which challenged me in a variety of ways with conducting nocturnal shoots, I entered 2023 with both trepidation and curiosity. Would the mental ‘wabble babble’ which affected my desire to venture out on shoots maintain it’s hold upon me? With more people out and about during the night, would I let them (and the specter of Covid) deter me from pursuing imaging delights? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s having at it!



Cultivated an ‘alien to me’ imaging game plan once I broke the shooting ice with my initial Gowanus shoot in January. After so many years of conducting night shoots haphazardly all over the city, decided to implement more thought into what I was doing. Strategizing a shooting workflow actually did wonders for my mindset. Keeping things simple, I broke the imaging schedule into boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan) and shoots per borough (8). Felt that covered a nice amount of photographic possibilities, and left room for the unexpected.
About halfway thru June, I shut the nocturnal shooting down to focus on storm shoots. I was up to 15 completed night shoots, felt really good about what was captured (the quality and creativity absolutely rocked). Over the course of the summer life decided to interject with some horrific news. My mother’s health was declining badly, the recent discovery of 3 year old news of a Dementia diagnosis changing our family dynamic on the fly.



Photography suddenly ceased to be; the focus was on mom, and my sister and I circled the wagons to help her anyway we could. Brought her up to Brooklyn from Florida to provide better quality of care in person (we both took Medical Leaves of Absence from our jobs), vs having her placed in a nursing home facility. Our mother lost her battle with Dementia on January 6th, 2024. Her absolutely debilitating and horrifying journey with this disease was over, something we witnessed up close every step of the way.
My thinking these days has been acclimating to a universe where my mother no longer resides. It makes zero sense to me, yet I’m trying to move forward. In the meantime, I did have 15 amazing shoots from 2023, and I do want to share samples of what was generated.



Presenting

NYC Nights, Volume 11

All images were taken during the year 2023



Chapters

1 Gowanus

2 DUMBO

3 East Williamsburg Industrial Fun

4 Greenpoint Wandering

5 Kent Avenue Bop

6 Downtown Brooklyn Flatbush Fun

7 Bushwick Collective

8 Brooklyn Bridge Park Fog Moments

9 Astoria

10 Long Island City Industrial

11 Corona

12 Maspeth Meandering

13 Hunters Point South Park

14 Robert F Kennedy Bridge

15 Hellgate Bridge

16 Panoramas