I thought now would be as good a time as any to explain the header at the top of this site (as of July 25, 2008).
My freshman year of film school involved a course in still photography that was a prerequisite for classes involving motion picture. Now, ironically enough, I entered film school without ever having touched a camera that didn’t get handed into the photolab and disposed of after processing. I got together some bucks from my summer job taking inventory in the back rooms of a local Filene’s and bought myself a fully-manual 35m SLR camera. You know, the ones with the big flashes and intimidatingly long lenses.
Anyway, our final assignment was to take photographs as if they were shots in a film and animate a story on the editing platform of the moment. I decided to do an updated version of the fairytale “Bluebeard”, making it into what I thought at the time was a Hitchcockian thriller. For those not in the know, the tale centers around a young woman who is married to a wealthy man. He tells her she can’t go in a certain room but that the rest of his mansion is hers to explore. Of course, the chick goes in the room and finds the seven dead bodies of his seven first brides. Needless to say, my project was more Romero than Hitchcock.
Anyway, I decided that I needed a soft, reassuring place that could be an oasis of love in the middle of my noir-esque lighting scheme and corn-syrup fake blood. Something to contrast the antagonist’s chilling homicidal tendencies with the protagonist’s sweetness, because “contrast” was a word that would make it arty. Somehow, I decided the perfect place for a murder-centered thriller’s would be a cozy cafe.
Thus was born the photo in question. I propped myself in front of the “Tea Spot,” an adorable place to have high tea, write a paper, or admire tea cozies. The shop is on a section of Macdougal that’s an odd mix of urban redbrick apartments, tourist shops, and Greenwich Village eating establishments with menus that never seemed to constitute a meal, all within view of the love of my life: Washington Square Park.
Of course, the shot never made it into the film, but it remains one of my favorite photographs I’ve taken (and I’m no photographer). It encompasses everything I loved about Greenwich Village: the warmth of the coffee shops, the quaintness of specialty stores, the way the beautiful greens of the park contrasted with the greys of the city to create the intersection of nature and human progress.
It also makes me crave green tea and chocolate chip scones.
