The Wildlife of Manhattan

My first photo project of the term.

If you’ve never taken an art class, you probably have experienced far less rage than I.

It’s not the same kind of rage you feel as when you’re trying to complete a hard task. I’ve taken hard econ and finance classes and though they both come with their fair share of frustration, it’s just not the same anger you feel when you’re given a prompt for your n

ext art project.

I remember the first real art class I took sophomore year of college, it was a photography class. At the beginning of one of the classes at the beginning of the semester, our professor told us he was going to pass out a sheet of paper with our first prompt. We would then have to, three weeks later, produce and show six photographs that went along with our take of the prompt. 

I was expecting a page of writing, maybe even just a paragraph. I mean, if he’s passing around a whole sheet of paper, shouldn’t there be something written on it? Alas, I was handed my prompt sheet and there was just one word on it, “Collection”. I thought I had been given the wrong paper. Like a printer mess up or something. But, no. Our professor went on to say that we could interpret “collection” in any way we wanted, and good luck! I threw the paper into the recycling bin on the way out.

Because of this long and drooling experience of being handed a paper to just read one word on the page, I wasn’t too surprised when my Parsons summer professor did something similar, though not any less frustrated. He didn’t waste the paper though, he just told us the broad and confusing prompt out loud. 

We were to use photography to create a map. He called it a “mapmaking project”. We tried to ask clarifying questions as, what does that even mean? With each question he would just shrug and say, “You decide” until people got the hint that he wasn’t going to go into more detail. The only other thing he said to us was that it needed to be an actual project, not just an amalgamation of 10 different pictures.

I mulled over the project while sitting in Washington Square Park eating a sandwich during lunch that day. There were so many things I wanted to photograph before I left NYC, for example the skateboarders in front of me, but I didn’t want to just attempt to fit something into the box of “mapmaking” that couldn’t perfectly conform. I am also one of the few students in the class who had photography experience, and I know the professor has higher expectations of me than the rest of my classmates, especially when it comes to project building. My project needed to be a very succinct project with a clear start and finish, theme, and personal aspect. In a city that is so foreign from everywhere else I have lived, how am I supposed to add in a personal aspect?

Around this same time was when I started experiencing more rage because of the lack of open green spaces around the city, especially near me. Everywhere else I have lived in the past I have been a few blocks, or just a back patio door, away from a big green open field where I could lay on my back and stare up at the sky. Obviously, these same kinds of luxuries were not afforded in Manhattan. It was also thanks to the transition from living in Brooklyn, which had more nature and I traveled to the park every day, back to 5th Avenue in Manhattan.

I started thinking about photographing around Central Park under the guise of the little access to parks in Manhattan vs the large access in the Midwest. But that was me trying to fit my desire to escape to the park into the box of this project.

That idea stuck with me though, and eventually transitioned into the kind of project idea I was looking for. During both terms of time in NYC, I lived on 5th Ave, went to school on 5th Ave, and regularly visited a multiple of parks along the same avenue. A majority of my NYC life has been lived on 5th Ave, which just happens to be the route that connects Washington Square Park to Madison Square Park to Bryant Park to Central Park.

This was my project: documenting how nature connects with the city on 5th Avenue starting at Washington Square and ending at Central Park. It had a starting point, ending point, theme, and a personal connection to myself, as I would completely go mad if it weren’t for these little interactions between nature and city. I mostly visited these four parks when I became overwhelmed by the city and needed to touch some grass and be connected with my childhood upbringing in the Midwest.

The project, due today, was the first project of the term which we only had three days to complete, as our first day of class was only on Monday. This week I’ve been struggling with being at my dorm in the evenings, especially right after school gets out, because it just doesn’t feel the same without my roommates from last term sitting at the table waiting for me. Usually the table is empty when I walk in the door after classes. I’m also not the biggest fan of one of my roommates, more on that later, and it makes me want to be out of the dorm in the afternoons until she ventures off with others.

In those terms, this project was also a personal excuse to get out of the house, which is just good to do in general. Every day after class for the past three days I would walk the short distance back to our apartment, quickly eat something, change into workout clothes and tennis shoes, and walk the 2.5 miles from my dorm to Central Park up 5th Ave, taking pictures of any green I saw along my path. 

I walked that route, camera in hand, water bottle in the Baggu bag around my shoulders, until the project was officially complete. Here’s what I ended up coming up with:

Yours truly,

Calihan