Things That Remain and Things That Were Removed
Keepers from a Hoboken photo walk: color, texture and reflections to close out 2023.
At the northern edge of Hoboken, NJ there’s a crumbling pier that extends into the Hudson River, a vestige of the river’s past as a working harbor and engine of commerce. When I (Diana) lived in Hoboken I could easily walk over to Frank Sinatra Drive (yes really) and walk out onto this pier. Was it unsafe? Undoubtedly… but it was this window into the past for a city that is constantly eroding, decaying, renovating and reinventing itself, with waves of new people and new ideas arriving and transforming it. That pier is now blocked off by a very official looking fence but I’ll always remember those heightened minutes spent out in the gusty winds wondering what was the history and what will be the future of the shifting pier beneath my feet.
When Tom returned from his photo walk with Colin Czerwinski (
) in Hoboken I felt a real pang of nostalgia for those intensive photography-fueled days when I lived there from 2005-2009. 14 years changes a person and changes a place, so I was curious to see in Tom’s photos what he came away with from this postage stamp of a city that I knew, for a time, so well. Let’s walk through the keepers together…One of my favorite photos from the shoot is this bank of telephones – or perhaps it’s a blank of telephones? The ghosts of telephones past? The subject of the photograph is what has been removed from the everyday thanks to the transformation of technology we all know has transpired.
Hoboken was the place where I really learned how to be a photographer, I walked its streets looking for photographs wherever I went, took portraits of my friends and myself and spent all my waking, non-working hours immersed in photography. Yes, “the city” was right there across the Hudson, but Hoboken had many layers to explore all on its own. There was so much to see if only you looked for it and kept looking for it, because that which was worth seeing might only reveal itself on rare occasions.
The nature in these photographs below are equally worth their feature, one planted purposefully, the other definitely a weed – but both sinking roots down and shooting foliage out into the urban landscape. Any other time of year, these photographs wouldn’t have been taken, but the late yellow foliage, clinging on longer than the rest, demands to be captured.
In the photographs I was happy to see that Hoboken is just as gritty and textural as ever. And colorful too! Colin had just returned from shooting in Japan where he had a field day with all the color and playfulness there, and yet although this day in particular was overcast and drab, Tom still found color. It’s all relative… Did the person who balanced the mostly blue palette against the salmon-hued wall realize the beautiful tableau left behind? Unlikely. Who painted that green square, soon to be demolished along with the remainder of the Burlington Coat Factory that has already become rubble?
Below, crumbling stucco reveals a continent of bricks hugged close by guardrails. Graffiti removal makes its own case to be considered as minimal abstract art. In each photograph, like the telephones above, the photographs are about removal. Whether by accident or on purpose, there is no photograph worth taking if something hadn’t been removed.
On reflection (ha), despite the nostalgia/longing/FOMO I had for Hoboken while Tom and Colin were shooting together, I’m glad Tom was the one to find these photographs, framing them carefully as is his way, and I got to be the one getting the first peek over his shoulder as he loaded them in and distilled them down to his favorites. We almost always shoot together, so shooting apart allowed me to see his work as I used to, as a surprise, as something unexpected, and as insight into who he is as an artist today.
ART DROP #7 CLOSES TONIGHT
So, until we return to Hoboken again for a Cuban sandwich at La Isla, that’s all from Hoboken, NJ. It’s also the last call for prints of Pipe Loop, which fits right at home with the rest of the photographs on this particular shoot, full of texture and even color in an understated way.
Pipe Loop
Hoboken, NJ, USA
by Tom Bland
Prints are only available of Pipe Loop until midnight December 7, 2023, with no further production of this work for at least a year after the close.
Is this really our last newsletter of 2023? Indeed it is… We’ll be back on January 1, 2024 with Art Drop #8. May it be worthy of kicking off the year we have been anticipating for so long, with our new home and the studio we so desperately need now tantalizingly within reach.
As I always loved saying on the last day of class before winter break – see you next year!
I’ve been working on pairing photographs for the last few months from a stack of a few hundred I’ve printed. It’s rad to see your pairings here too, I like seeing how other photographers find connections.
Enjoyed this a lot. And the blue pallet on the salmon wall is delicious.