The 6th Floor Blog: Ed Koch's Unconventional Portrait

In the spring of 1989 the magazine assigned Gregory Heisler to photograph Mayor Ed Koch for an article by Sam Roberts that was published on June 11, 1989. Heisler followed the mayor around "fly on the wall"-style over the course of two days, during which time, he says, he got "a peek of what Koch was like when he wasn't in front of the cameras." According to Heisler, the moment Koch got out of the car or helicopter he had been traveling in, he would be totally on, in full "How'm I doing?" mode. Heisler does remember being surprised at one point, though, when the mayor got in a helicopter and promptly fell asleep, despite the vehicle's noise. "It was like a lullaby to him," Heisler says. Sometimes, when Koch was being driven around the city, "he would crash for a few blissful moments of sleep and recharge his batteries," Heisler says. "Two seconds later he'd be wide awake and on again." He was clearly a power napper.

After seeing this side of the mayor, Heisler decided he "wanted to to show New Yorkers that side of Koch that was very thoughtful and introspective." He wanted to show what he was like when he wasn't in front of the cameras. Making such a portrait, he knew, would require working in a way that would be conducive to introspection. He chose to use the large 8″ x 10″ view camera. Because that type of camera requires each sheet of film to be loaded individually, it slows things down. Subjects react to it differently than they might normal cameras. They respond to the extra effort that goes into working with that camera, and Koch was no exception.

After the resulting photograph was published in the magazine, Koch liked it so much that when his mayoral term ended he asked that a print of it be hung in City Hall in lieu of the traditional, commissioned oil painting. The large print that was made became the first official portrait of a New York City mayor that was not painted.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Alec Soth's Great Plains Dispatch

For this week's cover story about the oil boom in North Dakota, we asked Alec Soth, known for his photographic road trips, to drive from his home in Minnesota to northwestern North Dakota last fall and document life there. Recently he answered a few questions about the project via e-mail.

What most interested you about this assignment?

About a year ago I woke up to the fact that my photographic work had become a bit too self-indulgent. Fed up with my Twitter-ish navel-gazing, I started working on a series of small stories about Middle America. More often than not these stories were about the tenuous nature of community, particularly in a time of economic turmoil. Most of this turmoil has been recession-based. So when I was approached by the magazine about photographing this community turned upside down by an economic boom, I was thrilled to see what it looked like.

I know you like to drive to your locations. Why is that?

Driving is a way of getting my head in the game. There's something about spending a lot of time in the quiet container of the car with the landscape whizzing past that somehow prepares me for the kind of attention needed while photographing. When I fly to an assignment, I feel like my body is there but my brain lags behind.

How have your road trips evolved over the years?

I used to need solitude in the car. All of my early work was made while driving alone. When I worked with writers or assistants, I felt self-conscious. But over the years, a lot of that has dropped away. Lately I prefer having other people in the car with me. It helps dampen my solipsistic inclinations.

In your book "From Here to There," you compare yourself to Joel Sternfeld, calling him "more of a social documentarian," someone who "really is interested in the social issues of the day." Are you becoming a social documentarian now?

You are absolutely right. I've been really aware of this shift in my approach. Just a couple of weeks ago I tracked down an old copy of Life magazine with W. Eugene Smith's ''Country Doctor'' essay. While I've always admired his work, I never I thought I'd identify with it. More and more I seem to be working in that tradition. But I really haven't thought through all of the ramifications of this on my career. It just feels like the right work to be making at the moment. But who knows, in six months I could be back in my basement finger painting self-portraits.

Tell us about the cover photo.

The great thing about this particular assignment was that there weren't all of these specific expectations to fulfill. I was given extraordinary free range to photograph whatever I wanted. That said, there was this one lingering expectation to make a killer cover picture. This meant not only making a great vertical image, but also a picture that functions as a kind of shorthand for the story. This led to what I came to call the "There Will Be Blood" problem. Since this is a story about oil, everyone involved in the project, myself included, had a mental picture of men covered in oil. But when I asked a local, he chuckled and said that such scenes might have been common 80 years ago, but it wasn't like that anymore. (Afterward, my assistant and I joked about carrying around a bucket of oil to dump on men during our shoots.) So you can imagine my delight when I encountered Brian Coffey at one of the drilling rigs I visited. But here's the thing, it isn't oil – it's the slurry used in the drilling process. Nevertheless, it worked for the picture. But the magic is the contrast of this grime with the snow and fog. When I saw that, it actually surpassed the mental picture I'd been dragging around with me.

What were your impressions of this community that has been so tremendously affected by the boom?

What's happening in North Dakota is a perfect inversion of what's happening in the rest of the country. While most of America is still dealing with the collapse of the housing bubble, there's a housing boom in North Dakota. While many American citizens can't find jobs, North Dakota employers struggle to find workers. What was interesting, however, was that it still looked and felt like a community in crisis. The infrastructure simply can't handle what's happening. Everyone I talked to complained about the exorbitant rent, the crowded and understaffed Walmart, the bad roads and so on. The place didn't look or feel any happier than most of the recession-stung towns I've been visiting of late. If anything, it helped me appreciate the moderation inherent in the sluggish rebound of the economy at large.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Past Forward: When North Dakota Was 'The Country of Lonely Old Women'

The North Dakota in this Sunday's magazine is one marked by rapid transformation, a place where oil derricks are springing up everywhere, and as the author of the cover story, Chip Brown, puts it, you might find "single-family homes with Tyvek paper flapping in the wind of what just yesterday was a wheat field." Striking black-and-white photographs by Alec Soth, taken in the Williston Basin, in the northwest corner of the state, accompany the article.

Soth's images are reminiscent of those that accompanied an article published by the magazine in 1995. In  "The Reopening of the Frontier," by Jon Margolis, the photographer Charles Harbutt captured scenes in and around Carrington, in North Dakota's center. But if there's an affinity between the two sets of pictures — mostly on account of their black-and-white palettes — the feeling of the two moments couldn't be more different. Where Brown is witnessing boom times, Margolis was writing about life in an emptied-out state:

What remains of human settlement in the rural Great Plains is a Federal welfare project, sustained by Government farm programs and even more by Social Security and Medicare. This is the country of lonely old women, the widows who don't want to move South and whose children have gone elsewhere to find jobs. There are small towns in western Kansas, in the Dakotas and in the Oklahoma panhandle where nothing thrives except the drugstore and the clinic, if there is one. Or maybe an ''antiques'' shop where the merchandise is really the detritus of several attics, and the proprietors are an elderly couple who don't have anything better to do.

Harbutt's photographs that accompanied Margolis's article, along with additional pictures from that trip that he provided to us, appear in the slideshow above.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the location of the Williston Basin in North Dakota. It is in the northwest corner of the state, not the northeast.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Ed Koch's Unconventional Portrait

In the spring of 1989 the magazine assigned Gregory Heisler to photograph Mayor Ed Koch for an article by Sam Roberts that was published on June 11, 1989. Heisler followed the mayor around "fly on the wall"-style over the course of two days, during which time, he says, he got "a peek of what Koch was like when he wasn't in front of the cameras." According to Heisler, the moment Koch got out of the car or helicopter he had been traveling in, he would be totally on, in full "How'm I doing?" mode. Heisler does remember being surprised at one point, though, when the mayor got in a helicopter and promptly fell asleep, despite the vehicle's noise. "It was like a lullaby to him," Heisler says. Sometimes, when Koch was being driven around the city, "he would crash for a few blissful moments of sleep and recharge his batteries," Heisler says. "Two seconds later he'd be wide awake and on again." He was clearly a power napper.

After seeing this side of the mayor, Heisler decided he "wanted to to show New Yorkers that side of Koch that was very thoughtful and introspective." He wanted to show what he was like when he wasn't in front of the cameras. Making such a portrait, he knew, would require working in a way that would be conducive to introspection. He chose to use the large 8″ x 10″ view camera. Because that type of camera requires each sheet of film to be loaded individually, it slows things down. Subjects react to it differently than they might normal cameras. They respond to the extra effort that goes into working with that camera, and Koch was no exception.

After the resulting photograph was published in the magazine, Koch liked it so much that when his mayoral term ended he asked that a print of it be hung in City Hall in lieu of the traditional, commissioned oil painting. The large print that was made became the first official portrait of a New York City mayor that was not painted.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Alec Soth's Great Plains Dispatch

For this week's cover story about the oil boom in North Dakota, we asked Alec Soth, known for his photographic road trips, to drive from his home in Minnesota to northwestern North Dakota last fall and document life there. Recently he answered a few questions about the project via e-mail.

What most interested you about this assignment?

About a year ago I woke up to the fact that my photographic work had become a bit too self-indulgent. Fed up with my Twitter-ish navel-gazing, I started working on a series of small stories about Middle America. More often than not these stories were about the tenuous nature of community, particularly in a time of economic turmoil. Most of this turmoil has been recession-based. So when I was approached by the magazine about photographing this community turned upside down by an economic boom, I was thrilled to see what it looked like.

I know you like to drive to your locations. Why is that?

Driving is a way of getting my head in the game. There's something about spending a lot of time in the quiet container of the car with the landscape whizzing past that somehow prepares me for the kind of attention needed while photographing. When I fly to an assignment, I feel like my body is there but my brain lags behind.

How have your road trips evolved over the years?

I used to need solitude in the car. All of my early work was made while driving alone. When I worked with writers or assistants, I felt self-conscious. But over the years, a lot of that has dropped away. Lately I prefer having other people in the car with me. It helps dampen my solipsistic inclinations.

In your book "From Here to There," you compare yourself to Joel Sternfeld, calling him "more of a social documentarian," someone who "really is interested in the social issues of the day." Are you becoming a social documentarian now?

You are absolutely right. I've been really aware of this shift in my approach. Just a couple of weeks ago I tracked down an old copy of Life magazine with W. Eugene Smith's ''Country Doctor'' essay. While I've always admired his work, I never I thought I'd identify with it. More and more I seem to be working in that tradition. But I really haven't thought through all of the ramifications of this on my career. It just feels like the right work to be making at the moment. But who knows, in six months I could be back in my basement finger painting self-portraits.

Tell us about the cover photo.

The great thing about this particular assignment was that there weren't all of these specific expectations to fulfill. I was given extraordinary free range to photograph whatever I wanted. That said, there was this one lingering expectation to make a killer cover picture. This meant not only making a great vertical image, but also a picture that functions as a kind of shorthand for the story. This led to what I came to call the "There Will Be Blood" problem. Since this is a story about oil, everyone involved in the project, myself included, had a mental picture of men covered in oil. But when I asked a local, he chuckled and said that such scenes might have been common 80 years ago, but it wasn't like that anymore. (Afterward, my assistant and I joked about carrying around a bucket of oil to dump on men during our shoots.) So you can imagine my delight when I encountered Brian Coffey at one of the drilling rigs I visited. But here's the thing, it isn't oil – it's the slurry used in the drilling process. Nevertheless, it worked for the picture. But the magic is the contrast of this grime with the snow and fog. When I saw that, it actually surpassed the mental picture I'd been dragging around with me.

What were your impressions of this community that has been so tremendously affected by the boom?

What's happening in North Dakota is a perfect inversion of what's happening in the rest of the country. While most of America is still dealing with the collapse of the housing bubble, there's a housing boom in North Dakota. While many American citizens can't find jobs, North Dakota employers struggle to find workers. What was interesting, however, was that it still looked and felt like a community in crisis. The infrastructure simply can't handle what's happening. Everyone I talked to complained about the exorbitant rent, the crowded and understaffed Walmart, the bad roads and so on. The place didn't look or feel any happier than most of the recession-stung towns I've been visiting of late. If anything, it helped me appreciate the moderation inherent in the sluggish rebound of the economy at large.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Past Forward: When North Dakota Was 'The Country of Lonely Old Women'

The North Dakota in this Sunday's magazine is one marked by rapid transformation, a place where oil derricks are springing up everywhere, and as the author of the cover story, Chip Brown, puts it, you might find "single-family homes with Tyvek paper flapping in the wind of what just yesterday was a wheat field." Striking black-and-white photographs by Alec Soth, taken in the Williston Basin, in the northwest corner of the state, accompany the article.

Soth's images are reminiscent of those that accompanied an article published by the magazine in 1995. In  "The Reopening of the Frontier," by Jon Margolis, the photographer Charles Harbutt captured scenes in and around Carrington, in North Dakota's center. But if there's an affinity between the two sets of pictures — mostly on account of their black-and-white palettes — the feeling of the two moments couldn't be more different. Where Brown is witnessing boom times, Margolis was writing about life in an emptied-out state:

What remains of human settlement in the rural Great Plains is a Federal welfare project, sustained by Government farm programs and even more by Social Security and Medicare. This is the country of lonely old women, the widows who don't want to move South and whose children have gone elsewhere to find jobs. There are small towns in western Kansas, in the Dakotas and in the Oklahoma panhandle where nothing thrives except the drugstore and the clinic, if there is one. Or maybe an ''antiques'' shop where the merchandise is really the detritus of several attics, and the proprietors are an elderly couple who don't have anything better to do.

Harbutt's photographs that accompanied Margolis's article, along with additional pictures from that trip that he provided to us, appear in the slideshow above.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the location of the Williston Basin in North Dakota. It is in the northwest corner of the state, not the northeast.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Ed Koch's Unconventional Portrait

In the spring of 1989 the magazine assigned Gregory Heisler to photograph Mayor Ed Koch for an article by Sam Roberts that was published on June 11, 1989. Heisler followed the mayor around "fly on the wall"-style over the course of two days, during which time, he says, he got "a peek of what Koch was like when he wasn't in front of the cameras." According to Heisler, the moment Koch got out of the car or helicopter he had been traveling in, he would be totally on, in full "How'm I doing?" mode. Heisler does remember being surprised at one point, though, when the mayor got in a helicopter and promptly fell asleep, despite the vehicle's noise. "It was like a lullaby to him," Heisler says. Sometimes, when Koch was being driven around the city, "he would crash for a few blissful moments of sleep and recharge his batteries," Heisler says. "Two seconds later he'd be wide awake and on again." He was clearly a power napper.

After seeing this side of the mayor, Heisler decided he "wanted to to show New Yorkers that side of Koch that was very thoughtful and introspective." He wanted to show what he was like when he wasn't in front of the cameras. Making such a portrait, he knew, would require working in a way that would be conducive to introspection. He chose to use the large 8″ x 10″ view camera. Because that type of camera requires each sheet of film to be loaded individually, it slows things down. Subjects react to it differently than they might normal cameras. They respond to the extra effort that goes into working with that camera, and Koch was no exception.

After the resulting photograph was published in the magazine, Koch liked it so much that when his mayoral term ended he asked that a print of it be hung in City Hall in lieu of the traditional, commissioned oil painting. The large print that was made became the first official portrait of a New York City mayor that was not painted.

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North Dakota Went Boom

Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times

Kevin Tschetter, 34, hauls water to and from active wells for KNS Enterprises. Originally from South Dakota, he was meeting with other KNS employees at the Scenic 23 Club in New Town.

Long before the full frenzy of the boom, you could see its harbingers at the Mountrail County courthouse in Stanley, N.D. Geologists had pored over core samples and log signatures and had made their educated guesses, and now it was the hour of the "landmen," the men and women whose job was to dig through courthouse books for the often-tangled history of mineral title and surface rights.

Apart from a few fanatics who sometimes turned up at midnight, the landmen would begin arriving at the courthouse around 6 a.m. In the dead of winter, it would still be dark and often 20 or 30 below zero, and because the courthouse didn't open until 7:30, the landmen would leave their briefcases outside the entrance, on the steps, in the order they arrived. And then they would go back to their cars and trucks to wait with the engines running, their faces wreathed in coffee steam. Sometimes there were more than 20 briefcases filed on the courthouse steps. The former landman who told me this — Brent Brannan, now director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Research Program — said he sometimes thought he could see the whole boom in that one image, briefcases waiting for the day to start, and it killed him a little that he never took a picture.

For many years North Dakota has been a frontier — not the classic 19th-century kind based on American avarice and the lure of opportunity in unsettled lands, but the kind that comes afterward, when a place has been stripped bare or just forgotten because it was a hard garden that no one wanted too much to begin with, and now it has reverted to the wilderness that widens around dying towns. In a way, of course, this kind of frontier is as much a state of mind as an actual place, a melancholy mood you can't shake as you drive all day in a raw spring rain with nothing but fence posts and featureless cattle range for company thinking, Is this all there is? until finally you get out at some windswept intersection and gratefully fall on the fellowship of a dog-faced bar with a jukebox of songs about people on their way to somewhere else.

All of which may explain the shock of coming around a bend and suddenly finding a derrick illuminated at night, or a gas flare framed by stars, or dozens of neatly ranked trailers in a "man camp," or a vast yard of drill pipe, or a herd of water trucks, or tracts of almost-finished single-family homes with Tyvek paper flapping in the wind of what just yesterday was a wheat field. North Dakota has had oil booms before but never one so big, never one that rivaled the land rush precipitated more than a century ago by the transcontinental railroads, never one that so radically changed the subtext of the Dakota frontier from the Bitter Past That Was to the Better Future That May Yet Be.

It's hard to think of what oil hasn't done to life in the small communities of western North Dakota, good and bad. It has minted millionaires, paid off mortgages, created businesses; it has raised rents, stressed roads, vexed planners and overwhelmed schools; it has polluted streams, spoiled fields and boosted crime. It has confounded kids running lemonade stands: 50 cents a cup but your customer has only hundreds in his payday wallet. Oil has financed multimillion-dollar recreation centers and new hospital wings. It has fitted highways with passing lanes and rumble strips. It has forced McDonald's to offer bonuses and brought job seekers from all over the country — truck drivers, frack hands, pipe fitters, teachers, manicurists, strippers. It has ginned up an unreleased reality show called "Boomtown Girls," which follows the lives of "five bold and brave sisters" in the formerly drowsy farm center of Williston, N.D. Williston, whose population has tripled in the past 10 years, lies in the middle of the 150,000-square-mile Williston Basin, a depression in the crust of the earth that geologists now believe contains one of the largest oil fields in the world.

In the fall of 2011 in Crosby, N.D., Continental Resources, the oil company with the most acreage leased in the basin, erected a self-congratulatory granite monument celebrating its work in the so-called Bakken Formation, the Williston Basin rocks that, as Continental put it, ushered in "a new era in the American oil industry." The number of rigs drilling new wells in North Dakota's part of the basin reached a record 218 last May. It has now leveled off at around 200, as thousands of wells have been completed under deadline pressure to secure expiring mineral leases. Many thousands more will be spudded in the next two years as the boom moves from discovery to production and crews drill "infill" wells, complete pipelines, fortify roads, enlarge refineries and build natural-gas pumping stations and oil-loading train yards.

North Dakota's last oil boom, 30 years ago, collapsed so quickly when prices crashed that workers in the small city of Dickinson left the coffee in their cups when they quit their trailers. Apostles of "Bakken gold" insist that what's different this time is that this time is different, the history of frontier avarice notwithstanding. This is the boom that is going to change everything without the remorse and misgivings that have marked the aftermath of so many past orgies of resource extraction. This is the boom that won't leave the land trashed, won't destroy communities, won't afflict the state with the so-called Dutch Disease in which natural-resource development and the sugar rush of fast cash paradoxically make other parts of the economy less competitive and more difficult to sustain. This is the boom being managed by local people certain they know how to look after their interests and safeguard the land they live on. This is the Big One that North Dakota has been waiting for for more than a century.

Chip Brown is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the filmmaker Whit Stillman.

Alec Soth is a photographer in Minnesota. He recently published "LBM Dispatch No. 3: Michigan."

Editor: Sheila Glaser

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Eat: A Time Before Tabbouleh

Sam Kaplan for The New York Times. Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer.

I had been cooking for only a few years when, in 1972, a friend gave me "A Book of Middle Eastern Food," by a woman named Claudia Roden. In my cooking life, there was no more important influence than that book.

Roden rose to prominence later than Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, the two grandes dames of mid-20th-century cooking in Britain. (David and Grigson helped Britons "fix" a cuisine that had gone horribly wrong because of war and the accompanying hardships.) But when Roden published "Middle Eastern Food" in 1968, she built on their influence, expanding — almost exploding — the vision of what was possible. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say there was effectively no hummus or tabbouleh before then. And suddenly there were not only those, but also rosewater, meat cooked with dates and phyllo dough.

The reason for Roden's broader view is simple: She was born in Cairo to a family of Syrian Jews, left for school in Paris when she was 15 and was reunited with her parents and siblings in London, when the Suez crisis of 1956 chased the Jewish community out of Egypt. Her first book was inspired by the food of her childhood. Her research ultimately led her to write extensively about the foods of North Africa, Spain, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Her "Book of Jewish Food" is the most comprehensive work on the subject and, unlike many books on the topic, gives equal weight to the cooking of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews.

I wanted to cook with Roden for years, and finally, on a recent visit to London, I was invited to her home to do so. What to cook with someone who awes you?

The answer: a meal. We started with lentils with noodles and caramelized onions. I remembered the first time I made this dish and how thrilled I was at the combination of legume and pasta (not rice!) and the sweetness of the nearly burned onions. We moved on to a slow-roasted shoulder of lamb, cooked with couscous and dates, a delicious combination of sweet and savory whose aroma is almost unbelievably enticing. And we finished with what she calls knafeh à la crème, a beautiful pie of kadayif (essentially shredded phyllo, which goes under a variety of similar-sounding names) filled with a cream thickened with rice flour and scented with orange-flower water, a dish that is as exotic now as Roden's first round of recipes was to me 40 years ago.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Past Forward: When North Dakota Was 'The Country of Lonely Old Women'

The North Dakota in this Sunday's magazine is one marked by rapid transformation, a place where oil derricks are springing up everywhere, and as the author of the cover story, Chip Brown, puts it, you might find "single-family homes with Tyvek paper flapping in the wind of what just yesterday was a wheat field." Striking black-and-white photographs by Alec Soth, taken in the Williston Basin, in the northeast corner of the state, accompany the article.

Soth's images are reminiscent of those that accompanied an article published by the magazine in 1995. In  "The Reopening of the Frontier," by Jon Margolis, the photographer Charles Harbutt captured scenes in and around Carrington, in North Dakota's center. But if there's an affinity between the two sets of pictures — mostly on account of their black-and-white palettes — the feeling of the two moments couldn't be more different. Where Brown is witnessing boom times, Margolis was writing about life in an emptied-out state:

What remains of human settlement in the rural Great Plains is a Federal welfare project, sustained by Government farm programs and even more by Social Security and Medicare. This is the country of lonely old women, the widows who don't want to move South and whose children have gone elsewhere to find jobs. There are small towns in western Kansas, in the Dakotas and in the Oklahoma panhandle where nothing thrives except the drugstore and the clinic, if there is one. Or maybe an ''antiques'' shop where the merchandise is really the detritus of several attics, and the proprietors are an elderly couple who don't have anything better to do.

Harbutt's photographs that accompanied Margolis's article, along with additional pictures from that trip that he provided to us, appear in the slideshow above.

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