Seen a Few Things
Photo Essay | Jesse Pesta
I was passing through one of Brooklyn’s cooler-than-you neighborhoods when a friend spotted me standing on a sidewalk, looking at something. He saw me first — I didn’t see him — maybe because I was distracted by the thing I was looking at.
It was a chain link fence, covered in knitting. Someone had knitted a big piece of street art into a long stretch of fence. The knitting ran the better part of a city block.
We exchanged hellos and then he asked, “Where’s your camera?”
Now that was a question. I’d gotten into the habit of not carrying a camera so much anymore, and the reason wasn’t so great. Basically I’d settled into a drowsy, I’ve-seen-a-few-things attitude accompanied by a general posture of, “Jesus Christ, someone knitted another fence.”
Why the hate on the knitted fence? Colorful yarn now enhanced a gloomy fence around a weird pit. Dozens of fluffy yarn balls, like the ones you might expect to see atop cheerful wintry sock caps, danced in the breeze.
And I found it annoying for some reason.
Let’s be clear. A perfectly wonderful person probably did the knitting, or was it crochet? Who cares because either way they’d knitted a fence, and why should that cause a dark stormcloud with little cartoon lightning bolts to form over anyone’s head, as it had mine?
For me at least, that’s just how NYC works. Once in a while, the switch flips. The city is just zany enough that sometimes the zany things suddenly feel ordinary. And ordinary things – the garbage smells, the neighbor’s dog that always tries to kill me, the people with woofers — in other words the usual little forgettable pinpricks of daily life, balloon into big fat reminders that the city has you in the crosshairs.
For example, maybe you bought some bright red, delicious looking tomatoes at the store today. By the way, that’s an act of optimism in NYC. This time my tomatoes will be different! Anyway, you get home and cut one open, only to find that it’s as white and crusty inside as the fossilized bar of soap you saw sitting unused at the “employees must wash their hands” sink at the deli, just after you watched the guy behind the counter touch your sandwich with his entire hand.
Let’s talk about car horns. Yes, we all know that honking in New York is about expressing impotent rage at the universe — but let’s go deeper than that. Because remember, we’re in the bad place. Honking isn’t just honking, you see. It’s more like our modern version of a lizard-brain grunt that translates roughly as “Attention, everyone: I am irrelevant! I’ve honked a million times, with nothing to show for it, yet I am honking again. I am powerless, clueless and deranged but this time my honk will be different!”
Multiply that by all the honks in NYC, and it’s a choir of existential despair.
Or, maybe it’s just someone blowing their horn.
Like I said, the bad place.
It’s a place that can make you think sour, vinegary thoughts. Which is how I found myself standing there, frowning at someone’s knitting.
So I’d like to thank a different friend, Laura Holson, for suggesting something around that time that I wouldn’t have normally done. Once in a while she’d invite a few people to spend an hour or so walking around someplace in the city, taking photos. Afterward her little group would get a beer and compare what they’d shot.
The idea was simple. Look around.
Off we went.
We chose perhaps the most stereotypical place in NYC to do it, namely Chinatown. In fact I’m the one who suggested it, because I had an idea. I’d look for people taking photos of the touristy catnip stuff and maybe catch them in the act. In other words, I’d photograph people photographing Chinatown. It’d be a little harmless fun at the expense of people snapping photos of crowded sidewalks, ducks hanging in store windows, red lanterns or whatever, right? It would make for a silly commentary on something.
We split up, agreeing to meet an hour or so later for that beer.
You probably know where this is going.
A few minutes later and a few blocks away I spotted one of the people from our group. And guess what that person was doing. Yes, that person was photographing something in Chinatown.
This is when the problem with my idea became obvious to me. My idea was rather disagreeable.
I’d set out to have fun at the expense of strangers taking their little snaps here and there. But now I was looking at someone I knew, doing the exact thing I’d set out to have fun with. And more to the point, I knew why that person was doing it. In fact, I’d been the one to suggest it.
I didn’t want to have fun at their expense. So why have fun at the expense of someone I don’t know?
In light of my slow-to-bloom awareness that I didn’t like my idea, another thought occurred to me. What if someone else had photographed me that day? Was I doing anything better, or worse, and who’d have even known my intentions anyway? (As an aside, if someone had in fact photographed me, it would have made that photographer a photographer photographing people, photographing people, photographing people. Think about that for a minute.)
The mind boggles. But anyway here’s the point. At the risk of torturing the knitting analogy, standing around looking at something someone knitted and thinking, “that knitting is dumb” isn’t as creative as knitting your own thing, whatever it is.
I’ve wondered about the fence knitters. In fact recently I Googled around, and images of several of the fences that I remember seeing back in the day are pretty easily found. Because of course they are. People were knitting fences.
Did the fence-knitters get out of bed back then with their gear and say, I’m going to go out and have fun at someone else’s expense with my art? Probably not.
I don’t know what they thought, of course. Maybe they were contemplating revenge.
But I do know what they did. Which was to make something creative and unusual. To put it another way, they didn’t just sit in traffic and blow their horns out of existential dread.
Anyway, these are some of the photos from the hour I spent in Chinatown that day, accidentally changing my point of view. Are they entirely original ideas? Nope. But I feel they’re less contrived than my original plan. Even ones that have a whiff of “trope” about them, like the photo of the guy sitting at the game board. A man concentrates on his play. A crowd concentrates on the man. It’s real.
My favorite is at the top. The woman with the umbrella. I reckon she’s seen a few things.