ROOFTOP
These photographs were taken over a span of fifteen years, 1985 - 2000, from my one time home on a high-rise in the old Yorkville section in Manhattan. It was often mesmerizing to watch the sunlight on empty rooftops of aging low buildings far away down from me.
Sometimes they evoked tender affection in me, and sometimes keen melancholy, depending on the angle of sunlight and the dramas of the sky, and of my life.
Weatherworn air vent pipes and chimneys cast shadows like sundials on these empty open field in the middle of a bustling mega city. Occasionally, a faint smoke rose from a chimney like an SOS from the underground to the visible world above. There was never really anyone there but a forgotten ladder or a lone rusting beach lounger. The sun oscillated from dark grim December to Summer Solstice, as we had our birthdays, Christmas, summer trips, over and over.
Those nameless trees pushing through urban asphalt cracks, also stood in the back alleys of these aging brownstones, flowering and shedding their leaves under the pivoting sun high beyond the concrete canyons.
I wonder sometimes, if those trees were all from one mother rhizome running underground, pushing up new shoots wherever it finds unpaved opening. They stood with arms spread like bronchial tubes of our lungs, breathing, spreading finer and finer branches up toward the sky.
Irrepressible and timeless tree of life.
These photographs were taken over a span of fifteen years, 1985 - 2000, from my one time home on a high-rise in the old Yorkville section in Manhattan. It was often mesmerizing to watch the sunlight on empty rooftops of aging low buildings far away down from me.
Sometimes they evoked tender affection in me, and sometimes keen melancholy, depending on the angle of sunlight and the dramas of the sky, and of my life.
Weatherworn air vent pipes and chimneys cast shadows like sundials on these empty open field in the middle of a bustling mega city. Occasionally, a faint smoke rose from a chimney like an SOS from the underground to the visible world above. There was never really anyone there but a forgotten ladder or a lone rusting beach lounger. The sun oscillated from dark grim December to Summer Solstice, as we had our birthdays, Christmas, summer trips, over and over.
Those nameless trees pushing through urban asphalt cracks, also stood in the back alleys of these aging brownstones, flowering and shedding their leaves under the pivoting sun high beyond the concrete canyons.
I wonder sometimes, if those trees were all from one mother rhizome running underground, pushing up new shoots wherever it finds unpaved opening. They stood with arms spread like bronchial tubes of our lungs, breathing, spreading finer and finer branches up toward the sky.
Irrepressible and timeless tree of life.
