the fantastic photo editor erica ackerberg recently contacted me to ask if i'd be interested in shooting panoramics for the metropolitan section of the new york times newspaper. while i've photographed for the times magazine i'd never worked for the newspaper and i was excited to do so and to try my hand at this very unusual (for me anyway) panoramic format. i love candid street photography of new york. no one does it better than bruce davidson. mr davidson offered me an internship while i was a student at risd one summer, and while i loved his work and so wanted to learn from him, i turned down the offer becasue i was a little fearful of the famously grouchy photographer when i interviewed with him. i don't quite regret turning down the offer, i think i'm still a little scared of the man! i had never tried to shoot candid street photography in new york but was excited to try.
this assignment was unusual in that it was open ended. i could choose to shoot anything as long as i submitted it in the panoramic format. i had a few ideas, carried my camera with me everywhere and realized how hard it was to just happen upon a great image. when i received a newsletter from il buco announcing the sagra del maiale festival i bought tickets for the whole family and brought along my camera. there was such a fantastic visual display of pig everywhere! i tried as best as i could to keep the panoramic format in mind while shooting but kept going back and forth as i also wanted to just get great, full frame pictures too. my camera does not have the option to create a mask so when cropping full frame images to the 9.27x2.8 format later that day it just killed me how much info i had to cut out! i had to decide what i liked better, the meat hanging off the hooks at the top edge of the frame, or flames at the bottom of the frame. as you can see i opted to keep the hanging meat. i'm including the full frame of the images so you can see what the whole pictures looks like. further below are more festival of the pig photos, in case you need more meat in your visual diet. at the very end are a few of my favorite bruce davidson images.
amazing work by bruce davidson.
