Josh Sisk

A couple of weeks ago, I was taking pictures in Union Square for my article on The Warriors filming locations, when I happened to pass by these six crumbling columns on the mezzanine level near the 4-5-6 train.

Now, I’ve walked by these things a zillion times in my travels across New York City, but it suddenly occurred to me that I’d never actually stopped to look at them.

I’ve always just assumed them to be remnants from the old Union Square station, one of New York City’s original 28 subway stations, and it turns out that this is correct.

Dating to the Union Square of 1904, the station’s walls were once adorned with these fantastic terracotta eagles, along with some beautiful mosaic work:

The walls were uncovered and saved during one of Union Square’s many renovations, and installed as an art installation by Mary Miss in 1998. I love how the innards of the walls have been included in the display…

…showing a sort of geological strata of a New York City subway station wall:

The wall portions are arranged so that they steadily deterioriate…

…perhaps signifying the death of the old Union Square?

Now, here’s the thing – I’ve always known about these wall portions.

What I didn’t know about are the red frames.

See, as it turns out, the wall portions are just a small part of Miss’s installation. In fact, there are dozens of relics from the old Union Square strewn all over the station, all of which can be found enclosed by a red frame. And once you start looking for them, you’ll suddenly see them everywhere.

For example, I never thought twice about this Broadway Line directional arrow – but looking at it again, I now realize how incongruous its design is to the rest of the station. In addition to the mosaic Broadway text, note how the surrounding white tiling is in the old square style, while an additional mosaic strip runs along the top – all stopping abruptly at the red border.

Ditto this great old “Exit To Street sign.” Again, I’ve noticed it countless times before, but never stopped to consider how out of place what’s within the red frame is to what’s outside. In a way, each is literally like a window into the past:

Wandering around Union Square, I started finding red frames in more places than just the walls. Here’s a column you’d never think twice above – but wait! There are those red frames, and between them, we find a white-tiled column topped by a tiled stripe, an all but extinct creature in modern Union Square:

Here’s another red frame, one of my favorites, again highlighting not only the mosaic stripe along the top, but the difference in the old white wall tiling vs. new (and is that authentic old-fashioned New York City grime?):

Along one of the connecting passages…

…a very long mosaic stretches the entire run:

It gets even crazier, as the red frames turn up in the most unexpected of places. Here’s one looking down from the mezzanine above the 4-5-6 train…

…and if you look in at the right angle, you’ll see it’s highlighting “steel-bulb angle columns.”

In the corridor running north toward the 17th Street entrance, there are a bunch of slits cut into the wall…

…which offer a slightly more abstract window into Union Square:

For example, a tangle of telephone wiring:

I’m sure this is old news to a lot of you. But for anyone else like myself who’s been to Union Square a million times and never stopped to look, learning about the red frames is an eye-opening experience, as you suddenly realize you’re basically surrounded by a museum exhibit for the Union Square of old.

Ha, and all this time, I just assumed there was a fire extinguisher on the other side of that red frame.

-SCOUT

Originally produced for the US military in WW2, the Kodak Aero Ektar 178mm f/2.5 is a large-format monster of a lens. Mounted in bombers, facing down at Europe, this lens was sold to the US government for the price of a family car. It found its way into military surplus after the war, and was widely used in journalism and by professional photographers.

I managed to come into one of these lenses through my uncle, who was director of the radiation protection bureau of Canada. I mention the radiation part, because the rear element is made of thorium glass, which happens to be radioactive!

That’s right kids, it’s giving off all sorts of tasty rays. Luckily the danger is negligible unless you make contacts out of it, or grind up the glass and snort it. One side effect of the composition is the browning of the glass over time, which can be reversed (not that I want to. It’s such a nice tint of brown!)

So I have this lens, and I want to use it to close to its full potential. I don’t do film, and just placing it in front of my GH2′s cropped sensor would make it a super telephoto, so instead I decided to built a focus adapter.

Bust Out the 3D Printer

I decided on a ground-glass style adapter, but I couldn’t find frosted glass fine enough to resolve a lot of detail. What I ended up using was the diffuser from an old LCD I had.

Diffusers are super fine-frosted sheets of plastic that spread out and even out the backlight on your monitor. I cut a piece to size and knew I had to build a housing for it. I started off with a pair of aluminium square tubes, as knew I wanted to build an adapter that could host my digital camera.

The lens would throw onto a ground plane, and the camera would photograph the flipped image from the diffuser. Luckily, I have access to an Up! Personal Portable 3D Printer. I started measuring the lens and designing a support bracket in Cinema 4D.

The 3D printing in progress

The print was accurate to within 200 microns

The quality was so high that I printed a friction-fit ring to seal the lens to the bellows.

A handy man would have crafted a beautiful box out of mahogany, with dovetail joints, lined with fine black velvet and decorative brass hardware. I had matte black spray paint, epoxy, and little regard for proper ventilation. I set off putting together an aluminium frame to act as an epoxy magnet, and painted the crap out of it to cover up my shame.

The frame that holds this poorly thought-out design together

More epoxy than I care to admit to

The finished box. This is the length my camera needs to focus on the ground glass plane

I then folded a bellows out of stiff paper and cloth tape. The bellows provides me with a push-to-focus functionality

Here’s a diagram of the rig:

Here, with the top and back removed, you get an idea of what my camera is seeing. Note the shallow DoF and flipped picture

Here are some sample photographs shot by my DSLR using the lens and my DIY adapter:

I took the completed setup to my favorite creative meetup, Secret Handshake. It was taking place in a dark pub and there were about 75 people that night rubbing elbows. I had the whole assembly on a tripod with a Nikon flash bouncing off the ceiling. The atmosphere was perfect for this vignetting and graininess:

About the author: Patrick Letourneau is a freelance 3D artist based in Winnipeg, Canada. You can connect with him through his website, on Twitter as @PolygonSandwich, and on Vimeo. This article originally appeared here.

A radical feminist and a well-known figure of the Manchester punk and post-punk scene, Linder Sterling is known for her collages and montages, which often combine images taken from pornographic magazines with images from women’s fashion and domestic magazines, particularly those of domestic appliances, making a point about the cultural expectations of women and the treatment of female body as a commodity.

The post ASX EXHIBIT: Linder Sterling – “Collage Montage” appeared first on ASX | AMERICAN SUBURB X | Photography & Culture.

 
On the Passage of a few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972 is an interesting short film by Branka Bogdanov primarily documenting the work of ultra-leftist French philosopher Guy Debord, author of the influential post Marxist study of 20th capitalism Society of the Spectacle. The film explores Debord’s influence on the Paris riots of May 1968 and the nihilistic aesthetics of the punk rock era.

Interviewees include Greil Marcus, Malcolm McLaren and Sex Pistols graphic designer Jamie Reid.