Category Photography
Hell’s Kitchen in the 1970s
Every May, New Yorkers flock to the Ninth Avenue International Food Festival. Artist A.S. Graboyes captured what the festival was like when it first began back in the 1970s.
A Pedestrian’s Eye View of La-La-Land
In American’s most car-centric city, snapping photos of façades as only a pedestrian can.
A Brief Walk Through the Circles of Hell
A long layover and short walkabout in Amsterdam reveals a unique city, new discoveries, and the sheer magic of the brief trip.
A Beach Town, After the Season Ends
New England’s last true honky-tonk seaside resort empties out after summer’s done. Photographs of a snowy November day at Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
Scandinavian Color: The Houses of Visby
Photographs of the colorful cottages of a medieval walled city in the Baltic Sea.
The Many Faces of an Antique Mall
At a small-town Midwestern antique mall, faces from the past peer at you from every shelf.
Vanished Chesterfield
I spent most of the first decade of my life in a relatively new development in a then-exurban part of Richmond, Virginia, called Midlothian. Midlothian as a community dates back a couple hundred years and was, for a long time, known for coal mining. If my elementary school teachers told the truth, it was the […]
The End of a Benetton
Last winter, I wandered into the United Colors of Benetton in Dupont Circle in its final days. I managed to snap a few photographs of the Terracotta Army of nude mannequins that stood guard in the back of the store.
The Vulgar Pleasure of 1970s Food Photography
In a fascinating series of articles over at The Foodie Bugle, food photographer Helen Grace Ventura Thompson describes how food photography has changed over the decades. In the 1950s, she writes, “the pictures looked as though they were taken from the top of a ladder, six or eight feet away.” Beginning in the 1960s, higher-end […]
Memories of a SoHo I Never Knew
When I was maybe twelve or thirteen, weaned on Simon & Garfunkel’s hymnal “Bleecker Street” and a healthy mid-90s diet of Friends, with some nebulous notion of someday running back to the Big Apple, the city of my birth, my parents sat me down and made me watch After Hours, Martin Scorsese’ brilliant nightmare of […]
Cave Art of the Stockholm Metro
Stockholm has one of the most spectacular subway systems in the world, the T-Bana, which is quite saying something when you consider the marble palaces of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the concrete cathedrals of Washington, and the archaeological ruins of Athens and Mexico City. The system is billed as the longest art gallery in the […]
A Tale of Two Markets
A photo tour of gentrification and redevelopment in Washington’s old central wholesale market. If you follow food culture in Washington, you’ve probably seen this place: Like the sign says, it’s called Union Market. Union Market was developed by Edens, a multibillion-dollar developer and property owner based in Columbia, South Carolina. Edens holds over 100 shopping […]
American Pompeii, Part Two: The Rest of White Flint Mall
In a post last week, American Pompeii: After the Food Court Closes, we published photos of the food court – surreal, with its neon lights and its sci-fi paintings – at the mostly abandoned White Flint Mall, which is slated for demolition. Earlier this month, a judge once again blocked an attempt to halt the redevelopment. […]
American Pompeii: After the Food Court Closes
Photos: Stillness and silence at the abandoned White Flint food court. When it first opened in 1977, White Flint Mall was pure glamor. Donna Karan attended one of two celebratory black-tie events. Elizabeth Taylor – Cleopatra herself, then on her sixth or seventh husband, Senator John Warner of Virginia – attended the other. Through the expansive glass […]
Duck Pie 