NEW YORK PHOTO BLOG / DAVE BECKERMAN

I had, from an early age, a feeling that everything, and everyone would disappear someday. My uncle who was sitting across from me would be gone. The view from my bedroom window would disappear. The apartment would dissolve. And everyone and everything that I knew would someday be gone. And if not gone, changed. I don’t think that at the age of 14 or 15 I could put this feeling into words, as I can now, but I can remember photographing my sisters, my mother and father, my friends, with this sense of trying to capture them before they evaporated into time.

The reason that I write this now, is that I was looking through some old negatives from thirty plus years ago, and was amazed at what I was trying to do. There are many photographs which are simply my feet in the foreground, on the window sill, with the Park across the way in the distance. Over and over, I took this shot. There are shots of my Uncle eating a sandwich at the table, where I seem to be about two feet from him and he is giving me that look of annoyance that I remember so well. I try now, to understand where this feeling came from. Even today, I seem to be attracted to just ordinary things that are around me that I feel will soon be gone.

Some of it must go back to the early years on University Avenue — where my world, my apartment, my school, and the things that I loved as a kid, disappeared as the neighborhood ‘changed’. We lived on the border of what was mostly an Irish neighborhood, that very quickly was eaten up by the projects, and crime, and when I was around 13 we picked our things up, and moved. By the time we moved, murders in the neighborhood were commonplace. The building that I grew up was abandoned. Almost the entire street across from where I lived was filled with empty buildings used for shooting galleries. The deli was gone. The candy store burned down. The place where I used to take piano lessons was leveled. And for a long time, that street, the street where I played, and dreamed — became one of those South Bronx pictures that you used to see in the papers.

I never worked in color. The images of my childhood are still in black and white. Color was something the neighbors had in their new t.v. set. My dreams and memories, the early films I saw, were all in black and white. When I see color photographs today, with their vivid eye-popping saturation, they don’t look like the world I see, or the world I want to remember.

Dad, 1967

Dad's Brother Hy 1972

[November, 2001]

P.S. If you’d like to see what the early pre-blog (I called it a Daybook) looked like, I’m slowly importing those pages (usually without the pics) into this blog.

You’ll notice that unlike the usual blog I was actually able to develop certain ideas during a one month post (here is January 2002).

And here is a video of dad talking about looking for his brother Hy in Germany at end of WWII.

March 1, 2002

Call me Argo. Continued.

I was lying on the computer-floor room when Mr. Joseph (Joseph’s Asprins) came in. Mr. Joseph was the head of the department. He was a cross between a porcupine and a warthog. He had hairs that bristled out of every pore, including his nose and ears. He wore the big suit in the agency. Broad pin-stripes which signified that he was high up on the food chain. I had discovered that the pin-stripes were more than just a fashion statement, but that they were part of some masonic ranking system. The further apart the pin-stripes, the more power the wearer had. Mr. Joseph had two expressions: a scowl, and a piercing glare. Right now he was showing both of them. He looked down at me, looked at the flashing lights in the computer room which signaled that the power supplies had been pulled apart, and bared his lower teeth.

“Well Argo,” he sputtered “what are you doing on the floor?”

Things were still spinning around and I had a bump on my head from where I had hit the corner of the server box, and Mr. Joseph’s question had an echoing effect on me. I heard myself muttering that I had tripped over the wire. Mr. Joseph reached out a hairy, bristling arm and jerked me up to my feet. He still towered over me, and I was looking up into his nostrils.

Mr. Joseph was no idiot. Far from it. He had graduated from Columbia University with some sort of post-doctoral degree in robot intelligence, or something like that. We had heard that he had designed robots for NASA at some point. So as I say, he was no idiot, but as far as management skills goes — he must have read the Ghangis Khan management handbook. In fact, those bristles that protruded from every pore were the most human thing about him.

As I mentioned, he had two expressions. He only had about two phrases that you could count on him saying everyday, “Is it done yet?”. And “How much longer do you expect it will take?”

Yes, he was a cold-hearted bastard.

This agency job was really my first “real programming” job. And I came in all eager and excited to prove myself. But no matter how fast I worked, I was always behind. And I always knew that first thing in the morning Mr. Joseph would be standing behind me, asking, “Is it done yet?” And I would always be abashed to say, “Sorry…I think it’ll be another few days.” At which he would turn around on his heel and march off.

It was a two man project. Me and Dudley were writing a program to analyze overnight advertising statistics. Dudley, unlike me, had been a college professor, and was a database specialist. I was just doing the front end. We sat in a tiny cube together, back to back, and one day Dudley told me that if Joseph asked him, “When it was going to be ready” he would just sit there and stare at his nails without saying anything. He advised me to do the same.

And sure enough, the next morning when Mr. Joseph asked the question, “When will it be done” Dudley just looked at his nails. The silence was unbearable. Mr. Joseph began scratching the hair in his ears. Dudley seemed to be counting how many fingers there were on his hand, as if something in the count might have changed overnight. I don’t know how long the silence lasted, but eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer and blurted out, “Soon, Mr. Joseph. Maybe tomorrow.” Dudley shot me a withering glance, and Mr. Joseph walked away.

* * *

Mostly spent the last day or two cleaning up and making room for the larger mat boards that are on the way.

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