NY Sin Phoney In Face Flat Minor

The Unloaded Camera Snapshots were launched as an exercise to document the “snapshots” of everyday life in Paris with Paris Scratch & continued upon my return to NYC. The exercise consisted of “taking” a written “snapshot” per day. ere was good reason for this: I, like other New Yorkers, had become, as Flora Lewis described it, “inured to the ravages around them they scarcely notice anymore.” A deadening of our senses &, never mind our idealism, allows us to believe we’re outwitting our environment. The Unloaded Camera Snapshot idea documents “snapshots” consist of zen blinks, pop ashes, heated moments, & satori-sloshed sidewalk haikus that re-pollinated my existence with the fecund details of the quotidian. I was already wandering anyway, taking cues from Thomas Wolfe, Poe, Henry Miller; using my 3rd eye as a macro lens & suddenly noticing things again. It was like Robert Frank & Saul Leiter in the Life Cafe, in an act of bravado, deciding to smash their cameras & triumphantly take up pens instead, ultimately registering the magnified thereness of the world’s unavailability. As A.E. Housman noted: “Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon, I would go out for a walk. As I went along, there would flow into my mind, with sudden & unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or 2 of verse, sometimes a whole stanza …”