Culture Magazine

Friday Fotos: The Intersection of Dreams and Reality in Light

By Bbenzon @bbenzon
I took all of these photos on the same walk, yesterday evening along and near the shore in Hoboken, using more or less the same technique, a long-exposure in I zoomed the lens and moved the camera. The result is that here and there you can make out definite objects – in some cases more, some cases less – but they are distorted and obscured. This photo is perhaps the easiest to read:
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That's One World Center in the middle. From that the rest pretty much follows. The bright streaks in the foreground are street lights on the Hoboken side of the river.
This is the same kind of shot, but the target building is on the Hoboken side of the river:
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The building is one of the apartments in the Maxwell complex at the north end of Hoboken. I'm standing on one of the piers looking southwest toward the building. The streaks along the bottom are street lights.
This next one is rather obscure, but look at the left edge at the middle and just below:
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That's obviously the front end of a car, the right front wheel is visible. Just what's going on in the rest of the photo is, shall we say, obscure. As I recall, I was crossing Hudson Street at around 13th. That may be a person just to the right of the car. Of course there are lights.
This one is even more obscure, but I took it in the same walk across the street:
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Still, at the bottom center we can make out the silhouette of a person and that looks like another person near the left bottom. As always the jiggly streaks are lights. Since the lights are more or less fixed points, the shape of those streaks gives you a fair idea of the camera motion back and forth, side to side, top to bottom, and you can infer the zoom as well.
Now for some simplicity. This is obviously a person wearing a hooded jacket:
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Here we're behind two people walking away from me:
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The one on the left has a bag slung over her right shoulder. The one in the middle is pushing a stroller. I'm walking on the north side of 13th heading toward Washington St. from Hudson.
But where, you ask, are the dreams? You promised us dreams.
In your mind, in your mind.

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