This one you really have to see big- so click on the photo. Big dump trucks were crisscrossing this mountain of salt or gravel (in the north of Red Hook) against the backdrop of downtown Manhattan. I'd seen this of salt before, but thought it was a minor pile until the day the trucks were there and looked tiny on top of it. The only way to get the shot was to pull down the plastic covering this chain link fence and shoot through it... and I only had my little old Olympus camera loaded with long expired Kodak film. The result is a mostly obscured photo with an extra graininess and a strange hue, but I kind of love it.

This is my bulletin board in my office at the school where I work (in Red Hook)- showing portraits I've take of some of my students- all of them brave and beautiful people. I approach these pictures differently than the rest of my art. They are a component of the community building and youth development work I do at the school. But I'm proud of the pictures, just as I'm proud of the young people in them, and they are Red Hook, so I thought I'd show them here.

When I was out shooting a few weeks ago, these guys were playing ball- pitching from one side of Verona Street across to the other. The buildings on two sides of an industrial Brooklyn block present the perfect backstop and outfield wall (actually more like an infield wall) for a two man ball game. The ball they were playing with was a heavy rubber. Not a hardball- but I still wouldn't have wanted to pitch to this kid at close distance without wearing a glove to protect me from a line drive smacked right back at me. To be photographed these guys fell naturally into poses reminiscent of those on baseball cards or major league ballpark programs. They seem somewhere between men- with the actual swagger of a pro ball player, and boys- with innocent dreams of one day playing in the big leagues.