Photographing New York from the Waterfront

Go on location to photograph scenes of vibrant city from the water!

Capture sparkling water, atmospheric skies and soaring skyscrapers while refining your photo taking skills. With the growth of the New York Ferry service, we now have a chance to photograph and explore some less familiar neighborhoods from new perspectives, including from the water itself, and the ferries get us angles and shots we couldn’t get any other way. The ferry service now stretches all the way from the Rockaways to Astoria and Whitestone, with some great locations in between. Each week we will select a different destination, visually explore the route as seen from the water and also the destination area from the land side. Each week, the students will share their images with each other via Dropbox, Google Drive or other, and there will be time set aside in each class to critique the shoot from the previous week.

First session will be a 1 hour virtual orientation via Zoom to discuss meeting locations and equipment. The subsequent meetings will take place on location.

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This program is part of the Gilda and Henry Block School of the Arts.

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Instructor

Stephen Sherman

Stephen Sherman is a New York based photographer, working primarily in New York and Paris, and his work documents the rapidly changing face of the urban landscape of both cities. The work revisits the ideas of Charles Marville and Eugene Atget in a sense, and attempts to capture a disappearing civilization and way of life, both in Paris and in New York. The pictures aim to neither glorify the old nor negate the new, but to be a counterweight to the forgetting of our ideas of neighborhood and place.

All of the work is long term and on-going.

The Arrondissements Project st ...

Stephen Sherman

All of the work is long term and on-going.

The Arrondissements Project started in 2000 and covers all twenty arrondissements. In that fairly short period of time, the evolution of some of the arrondissements has seen the disappearance of one way of life, replaced by another that seems like a totally different species. Stephen's images have become a sort of architectural anthropology of certain neighborhoods.

The High Line Project began in 2006 and grew out of his familiarity with the Promenade Plante in Paris, where the same idea was put into being and was finished in 2000. Sherman started photographing the project before construction began, and has been photographing it since then. What had once been an area of quiet isolation and a certain feral splendor, has been reborn in a neighborhood that has undergone remarkably rapid transformation, even by New York standards.

The Draped New York pictures are simply the outward manifestation, the banners of change that are constantly going on around us. They let us know change is happening, but they conceal that change and we can't really know if we are witness to construction, destruction or just some plastic surgery.