2 Responses to “Factory Cat, Brooklyn”

1. 

   Lester says:

   July 9, 2010 at 2:00 pm

   I know you are attracted to abandoned buildings and factories. Why is that? Why aren’t you shooting the glittery new condos that are going up in their place?

   I bet you suspect that I’m going to tell you why.

   Anyone with a little historical knowledge realizes that these abandoned relics of the muscular industrial age were once new and pulsing with life. Now they are the hideouts and hunting grounds for feral cats. They are perfect symbols of a lost era and of the abrasiveness of time. The glittery new condos will also crumble away, perhaps in just a couple of hundred years when global warming raises the sea level and the sea floods the low-lying lands of Brooklyn. Maybe in a thousand years or so, archeologists will find condo remains in the ocean, just as remnants of Alexandria are being discovered in the Mediterranean today.

   Sometimes we prefer uplifting photos that document our achievements and sometimes we prefer the sobering truth about fleeting time and our ephemeral place in the world. But the cat, occupied as she is with finding food and safety, doesn’t have time to think about time. All she is worried about is the threat posed by this human with his camera. Well-supplied with small rodents, she will probably still be hunting when humans and their cameras have long-since disappeared.
2. 

   dave says:

   July 9, 2010 at 2:16 pm

   Lester – all well-put. Another reason that I’m attracted to abandoned buildings that were once throbbing with life: my past, the places that I lived, have been obliterated. Years back I was able to revisit the place where I grew up, on University Avenue. Yes, it was being repainted for the millionth time. But for a decade, that building had been unoccupied. And although it still stands – it is standing in name only. The neighborhood, the life that once flowed through it – that culture – is long gone.

   Same for my old home on Gunhill Road.

   And now for the obverse – the crummy place I lived in on the lower east side – is now the heart of condo city.

   Buildings, neighborhoods, cultures – they barely last a generation in this city. And as I dig through my old photographs, even of Paris – I ply my real trade – which is documenting city life and keeping it in a box, until it is time to be opened and looked into.