There is this group on Facebook that I often visit called NYC Photography. I use it to find places around the city that I might want to visit with my camera. The photographs are always beautiful, although there are suspiciously few people, cars, garbage bags, scaffolding, or anything else that screams New York City. I know photographers clean things up. I sometimes do it too. But I like looking anyway.
One day I was scrolling when I saw this really cool photograph taken at Washington Square Park. It showed the arch, and perfectly framed through the opening was One World Trade Center in its entirety. I was amazed. I was also a little shocked that I had never noticed the view before because I find myself near that arch pretty often. The park is a short walk from work, and having lunch outside makes me happy.
So one day I ventured out with my camera because I wanted that photograph.
I walked to the park and stood where it looked like the photographer must have been standing. No tower. What I did see was a very large building blocking everything behind the arch. So I moved. I stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue. I tried the other side of the street. I walked two or three blocks north. I moved left. I moved right. At one point I knelt down on the ground and almost got hit by a bicyclist.
I was committed.
And still, no tower.
I kept changing my perspective because I was sure there had to be an angle I was missing. Maybe the photographer had used a telephoto lens. Maybe I needed to be farther back. Maybe I needed to be lower. I kept looking for the place where someone could stand and see what I had seen in that photograph.
There wasn’t one.
I went looking for a photograph. I found the place where the photographer could never have stood.
I was so disappointed. I really wanted that cool-looking photograph. But I was also more than a little peeved. The image had to have been generated or significantly fabricated, and nothing in the post said that. It presented itself as a photograph of New York City, taken from a place where, apparently, no photographer had ever been standing.
Not everything on the internet is real. (duh, Sam)
I know that. Of course I know that. I also know photographs aren’t perfect records of reality. I crop mine. I sometimes remove something distracting. I choose where to stand, what to include and what to leave outside the frame. Every photograph is already a decision about what someone else gets to see.
But this felt different.
There is a difference between perspective and distortion. I had changed my perspective over and over that afternoon, and every new position showed me something slightly different. What none of them showed me was the photograph I had been promised. There was no angle I hadn’t found and no lens I hadn’t thought to use. The view itself didn’t exist.
Maybe that’s why it bothered me as much as it did. The photograph hadn’t simply made Washington Square Park prettier. It had sent me looking for a place that wasn’t there.
I still look at photographs for places I want to visit. I still take my camera out hoping to come home with something beautiful. And I will absolutely still kneel in ridiculous places to get the shot, although perhaps not directly in the path of a bicyclist.
But now I look twice.
Not because I need every photograph to prove itself to me. I think I just want to know that there was once a person standing somewhere on the other side of it.
