Stuart and I went to Central Park last night, to take our first look at the famed Gates. We’d both felt a little disappointed to see so much of the project on the news, and it detracted a little from seeing them live for the first time. But as we wandered our familiar path through southern central park, even my New York Jaded Badge faded a little. This wasn’t tacky performance art in the Village, or pretentious high-minded nonsensical abstraction and/or conceptuality (look, I work at an ART PHOTOGRAPHY magazine, I know from conceptual). This was, in the spirit of Christos’ other pursuits, art because it can be done. Art because it’s there, and fun, and a challenge, and because it’ll even briefly change the way a city’s denizens look at their familiar surroundings. And as such, it’s a miracle of success and awe.
For our entire one-hour meander, we followed underneath the mesmerizingly simple yet beautiful Gates. The whole time, we kept taking almost fruitless pictures of them with our tiny Olympus Stylus Verve. And finally, at the end, when I begged Stuart to take away the camera and withhold it from me no matter how desperately I begged for “just one more” (think Odysseus, sirens, tied the the mast, etc), I realized the downside to New York Gatesmania.
The cameras. O, the millions of cameras. As if the digital age didn’t already level the photography entrance playing field, projects like the Gates are hell on photohgraphers. I stared at the endless rows of orange heading into the dusky night and I realized, there are going to be MILLIONS of photographs of this project. And maybe one in a hundred will be strikingly original or exciting or different. If that.
It’s not that the project isn’t worth photographing. It is. In fact, to the true photographer (you know who you are) it’s almost impossible NOT to photograph it. The striking color. The play of shadows, both straight-edged and billowing, that the frames and the fabric provide. The familiar landscape dotting with the startlingly unfamiliar Gates. It’s almost a compulsion to people like me, and my fellow photographers both amateur and professional. You can’t NOT take the camera out and try just one more shot, just one more angle.
But all those photographers? Taking all those pictures? At all those angles? Does that leave any room for originality? Is the photo worth it if two hundred people have two hundred almost identical pictures? I stopped and spoke with one young photographer toting a serious Canon EOS-D, as he shot away at the Gates that cross the stone bridge. He agreed with my hypothesis, noting that his photography professor predicted this would be one of the hardest projects he’d ever shot.
My personal struggle with moments like this is the fear that I’m not experiencing the moment at all. That I’m not taking advantage of the saffron-wrapped gift that Jeanne-Claude and Christos have given the city. That if, like the photographer himself said, so very few of the images we make of such a simple yet alluring subject will be the sort of originality and uniqueness that makes us want to frame the moment, why did I have my camera out? Why couldn’t I stop taking pictures of the breezy carefree fabric and the symmetric beauty of a row of them?
Of the images we took, there are seven that stand out, and even those seven are merely duplicates of thousands of other pictures out there. But here they are, testaments to having been there – not testaments to having enjoyed it. Those moments, thankfully, live in my mind and can’t be blitzed to death with flash and photoshop.
See The Gates. And when I say “See the Gates”, I mean, take my advice. Go, but leave your camera behind. You’ll thank me later.