So, in other news, in one of the more bizarre weeks of my life, I was in New York City… not once, but TWICE within one week.
It just happens that way sometimes. Nevertheless, I’ve seen more modes of transportation in the past 10 days than the entire rest of the year thus far combined.
Subways and trains (Grand Central)…
…airplanes (that’s St.Louis out the window)…
…rented limo vans (in the Lincoln Tunnel from New Jersey into Manhattan)…
…taxis (in downtown Chicago)…
…and more miles of escalators than I would want to think about (this one in Trump Towers).
But, as I’m sure you’re able to tell if you’re reading this at all, its not JUST New York City… but from Little Rock I went to Chicago…
…to Detroit…
…then back to Chicago, then to Nashville (for the 2nd time in a week)…
…Atlanta…
…and then finish out where I started the week: New York City.
Well, the first trip was purely for fun, but it had been scheduled months ago. The second trip – I was there to tag along as the still photographer documenting the process of making a documentary – I knew about for about 3 weeks.
So this whole mess started about 3 weeks ago with an impromptu trip to Atlanta for a planning meeting and a quick interview…
Much of the planning was done on the plane to and from the Searcy International Airport to the Peachtree-Dekalb Airport just outside Atlanta.
But the interview?
Wait a sec!? Is that Jeff Foxworthy?
In fact… it is.
And let me tell you, he’s exactly the way he is in person as he is on stage or on TV. He just tells stories all the time and they’re hilarious. A number of times during shooting the interview we had to stop the cameras rolling to have a moment and laugh.
He’s just a really cool guy.
So, I left my university after classes on Thursday and didn’t return until the NEXT Sunday night.
I would dare say half of the documentary we were filming was planned in route to the next stop.
Most of the group started in San Francisco. If you can’t tell – San Francisco to New York City? – it was a documentary made from coast to coast. You can see more on the project here.
For me, it was a tour of “behind the scenes” shooting a medium budget documentary. A whole lot of back doors (this one coming into the service entrance of the Toys-R-Us in Times Square) and generally just romping around the country from private airport to airport in a tiny plane.
We filmed it some pretty ridiculous locations. You saw Centennial Park in Chicago earlier in the post… and a kid shopping for $1000 worth of toys to be donated to children who were victims of the California wildfires in the Times Square Toys-R-Us.
But I think one of the more fascinating places we shot was in the underbelly of the Manhattan Town Hall Theater.
It was all for the conclusion of our documentary and it was just kinda interesting to be behind/underneath the stage of a rather famous and somewhat historical venue on 43rd Street just off Times Square. The bald guy in the above photo is Leon Logothetis. He’s a major name in Europe and getting bigger here. He made a TV show called “Amazing Adventures of a Nobody” where he trekked across Europe on just a couple dollars a day relying on the kindness of strangers.
A couple of the others are philanthropists or prominent names in major charities around the country.
So, anyways… it all came down to the finale in the Town Hall Theater.
Its a classic-style Broadway theater. The previous night rapper 50 Cent performed here. But for us, we had “The NON.” They played some psychedelic rock and had painters and writers on stage with them. Pretty… um… intense.
But the Boys and Girls Choir of Harlem really livened everything up for the rest of the evening.
Its not that “the NON” was bad or boring or anything, it was just the HARLEM Boys and Girls Choir!
And then Andrew brought all the kids up – from San Francisco to New York – all together on one stage to finish out the evening, the week, and the 7 Days Across America project.
Yeah, it was all pretty intense, quite tiring, and downright bizarre at times…
…but we met some really cool kids, like Vinay who teaches elderly people and nursing home patients to use computers giving them an entirely new purpose and outlook on life. They’re able to stay in contact with family more and their quality of life increases… just because one 18-year-old guy used his skills for the betterment of others and himself.
And Zach…
…who, with his troop of ad lib comedians, perform for free in children’s hospitals across the country – much like a young Patch Adams.
Or the seven girls of “One is Greater than None” (or “1>0”)…
They’re all early-high school kids that decided one day to make bracelets and sell them… to rescue kids from child slavery. These slave kids work on boats on a large lake in Africa and are routinely beaten and killed by their masters… and if not the master’s staff, then they drown from being tangled in the nets as they try to free the boat’s propeller in zero-visibility, murky water. They’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to free these kids – it takes about $4000 for one kid.
And so that was the past few weeks. Now its been raining a lot in the mires of Arkansas… and Georgia is under water. Its 100º in Southern California and its -15º in North Dakota. People are thinking its the end of the world, but I say too bad… things are just getting good! As the Harlem Boys & Girls choir sang, “The best is yet to come!”
Much of my photography is documentary, showing real life. Its rooted in the natural. Based in showing you exactly what I see. When I see a woman walking through Times Square with a umbrella shielding a hand-drawn poster and letting herself get soaked by the fat drops falling from the skyscrapers – I ask myself, “Self, why is she doing that?” and I photograph it.
Then I show it to you. And we can all wonder together.
Isn’t humanity fascinating?
Stay tuned. There’s some biggies coming. My appointment board FINALLY cleared enough for some fun.
-Noah D.
