Aug 26, 2024 5 min read Intuition

All of This is a Commodity

@Snoeman is a legend in my neighborhood.

One Day at Freeman Alley

I took all these shots at Freeman Alley on June 15, 2024. If your work is shown and you'd like credit, please drop me a note and I'll add you.

This was a Saturday. The previous night I'd met a serious photographer at Two Boots on 7th.

Embarrassed I don't know this artist. Excellent and everywhere.

He was in town from KC and getting slices with a friend. Our conversations sort of overlapped at the pizza case and I liked his vibe so I offered to show him around the next day. It was just one of those intuitive things.

We met outside his hotel in Midtown around noon, and jumped on the 1 to South Ferry.

I showed him some of the sites of our country's dark origins that are scattered around FiDi. And the good stuff too.

We wandered from South Ferry up through Wall Street, City Hall and Chinatown, then over to Freeman Alley.

We have to figure out how to make pizza without the cows.

These are just some of the shots I took at Freeman Alley that day.

DeGrupo and Cope2, who's been around since the fucking 80s.

I took a lot of pictures that day, but he probably took 3 times as many shots as I did. It was awesome to watch him work.

He was bold and confident with the camera, asking people if he could take their picture and making solid connections with several of them. (He'd just been on a TV show so that helped.)

This is more than one artist and it's amazing.

I'm still mostly too shy to take pictures of people, but it was a big day of evolution for me as a 'photographer'. I learned a lot from him.

Is this Jet or no? Never seen this tag elsewhere.

When I was 20 I was on the back of a Jeep going up into the Himalayas. It was just me the lone tourist, and 20 local guys hanging off the back of the Jeep heading up into the foothills.

We were just blasting up these steep, stupid roads towards Darjeeling. No switch backs, just fighting straight up the side of the mountain. Was kinda surprised we didn't fall off and tumble into the valley below.

The view was incredible. One of the most amazing I've ever seen. Where the flatlands give way to the foothills of the Himalayas. I couldn't help but take pictures.

But the camera made me feel distant and different. I began to feel ashamed of it.

And I'd been reading Don Delillo's Underworld.

DeGrupo is one of the first crews to really grab my attention. IDK anything about them but they hit some big spots.

There's a scene where the main character comes over this ridge and sees a vast field of old B-52 bombers, all getting painted by an army of artists.

Delillo writes, "sometimes you see something so beautiful that you know you can't stay. You have to love it, and trust it, and leave."

Blanco found a way to survive in this ever-changing gallery.

I started to feel like the camera was interfering with my experience of the places I was going. Like somehow I was using the camera as a stand-in, or a delay-timer for actually feeling what the place felt like.

A week or so later, I traded my camera to a guy in Pokhara, Nepal, and I didn't take photos again for more than a decade.

Sometimes I still feel like I'm cheating the NOW when I take a picture. Like I'm avoiding the 'loving and trusting'. But mostly I'm glad I have a record of at least some of the wandering I've done.

Anyway, after Freeman Alley this lovely photographer and I pushed up to Houston and got on the train and took an extremely slow ride up to 145th, where we met my friend Y. for sunset at Riverbank State Park.