The Four Borough Film Tour
I’ve lived in New York City for nearly four years now, and the amount of times I think to myself, “Wow, I need to just walk around the city taking photos all day” without any follow-up has to be in the hundreds. Well, in December, I decided it would be the perfect time to do just that. Work was slow, and I didn’t have many projects that needed tending to, so I balled out on film and packed a backpack for what I now refer to as the Four Borough Film Tour (sorry, Staten Island).
I had a lot of things on my mind when putting this project together. I had been reading a lot of Patti Smith (M Train, Just Kids) and thinking about the city as a hub for artists and how that’s changed through the years. I had recently acquired my first medium format camera, which I had fixed up and not yet become attuned to. I had film I had bought myself for my summer birthday and still hadn’t shot by midwinter. So, in true Grace Puffer fashion, I found a way to tick off lots of boxes in one fell swoop.
In my backpack, I carried my Mamiya 645, Olympus OM-10, Yashica GSN Rangefinder, and my digital Canon 6D mii for extra assurance. I also brought along a mix of film rolls: my birthday Portra 400, my trusty Kodak Ultramax, Fujifilm 200, and even some Ektar 100.
Among my accessories, I brought a hot shoe light meter, extra batteries of what felt like 100 varieties, a portable charger, headphones, and rubber bands for completed 120 film rolls.
Living in the city that never sleeps and being someone who works in an industry that aligns with their hobbies, I have often found myself in creative ruts. With limited resources and time, it feels like everything I create has to be not only good but great, sellable even. It feels like there’s no time for rough drafts or bad art or even just art for art’s sake.
One of the goals of this adventure was to make bad images: to follow my instincts and try to see through my lenses, not just through my instagram feed.
Well, dear reader, I am here to tell you I did, in fact, make some bad images. I made some good ones too. But, most important, I made things for no reason. Not to sell, not to be good, and not even really to post (though I did). I made them just to use my hands, my eyes, the right hemisphere of my brain. I made them to use film and cameras gathering dust.
The plan was to end up in Coney Island around sunset. On summer beach days, I thought about how fun it would be to photograph Luna Park in all its colorful glory at sunset but those field trips always ended with a return train ride around 5 PM, much too early for summer golden hour pictures. With the winter sunset being oh so much earlier, getting to Coney by 3:15 PM meant starting my day no later than 7 AM in the Bronx.
I stepped off the 167th St 4 train around that time and stopped by a local place called “Lilly’s Cafe” for a plentiful breakfast. Over a colorful omelet, I made a plan to start with the remainder of a Kodak roll I already had loaded in my Olympus. Kids and families were walking the sidewalks as I explored, hustling to work or school. I stopped to take a photo of a lobster tank in a storefront and wandered around Rev. T. Wendell Foster Park. I passed the famous Yankee Stadium and crossed the Macombs Dam Bridge, walking hard against the morning wind back into Manhattan. Later, I would develop my film from this morning in the Bronx only to find I double-exposed the entire roll. What I thought was a new roll was a roll I had misplaced during my move earlier in the year. I remember tearing my apartment apart sometime in July looking for it. Somehow, it had disappeared for the perfect amount of time only to reappear conveniently to bungle my Bronx images.
Once back on Work Island, I boarded a downtown-bound C train from 155th to 110th-Cathedral Parkway. By this point, only an hour and a half into my journey, I had let my ears get too cold crossing the bridge and had to take a beat to warm up and kick the intruding headache. Morningside Park adjacent, Cafe Amrita was my warm and spacious respite. Here I rewound my double-exposed Kodak roll and swapped to my Yashica Rangefinder loaded with Ektar 100. This camera, given to me by my grandfather, has a fixed lens but came with a wide-angle adapter I knew I wanted to use to photograph St. John the Divine.
I had been to St. John the Divine once before when I performed there with my high school chorale. This massive church has space enough inside its central dome to comfortably fit the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, I was too early a riser, and the church wouldn’t be open for another half hour, a half hour I couldn’t spare. Instead, I explored the cathedral gardens for the time I had left before taking the 1 train down to 59th.
Emerging from the train station, I explored Columbus Circle and the winter market popped up in the corner of Central Park. It was sunny in the park and still covered with leaves from the fall. It was well into work hours but people were still bustling about: runners, tourists, and pedicabs alike. Here I swapped between my Yashica and the weighty Mamiya, also loaded with Ektar 100.
Like a true idiot, I thought it would be a good idea to walk south along 5th Avenue. I don’t spend a lot of time in Midtown by design and this was truly my personal hell. Sun failed to penetrate the skyscrapers towering on all sides and tourists stood idle center stage in sidewalks. I found very little inspiration in this gray dimension but managed to misfocus real good on a new Hot Dog Cart Friend.
(I did snap a shot of St. Patrick’s where I also performed for a Wednesday Mass with my high school chorale, have to brag.)
Relief came in the form of the Grace building, adjacent to the New York Public Library and the sweet, sweet 7 train station I would be using to make my escape to Sunnyside, Queens for lunch and portraits with friends.
Tacos ordered at Taqueria Santa Fe, I was able to use the restroom and properly thaw out the chill I had picked up in Midtown. Here I reloaded my Olympus with a (truly) fresh roll of Fujifilm 200 and my Mamiya with Portra 400, which I was excited to use for my only true portraits of the day.
(To the left is a double exposure caused by a film advance failure.)
My friends’ backyard served as our setting, giving us the texture and the tone of a midwinter sunny day. We call these “Sunnyside Gothic”.
With only so much time and sun left, I hopped back on the subway bound for Prospect Park’s Peristyle, a frequent haunt of mine my first year in NYC. Here I found people few and far between, the sun warm on my skin as it threatened the start of its descent. I had saved several rolls of Portra for the day’s end so I shot as many of the frames sitting in my cameras as possible.
At last, the time had come to board the train to my final destination of the day. The light trickled in through the windows of the Q train for the mostly above-ground trip from Parkside Avenue to Coney Island. I queued up my downloaded Patti Smith playlist and thought about all her visits to the boardwalk with photographer and young love Robert Mapplethorpe.
It was finally my chance to attempt self-portraits, for which I had carried around a tripod all day. I present to you now a math problem; Grace has 3 film cameras. Between those three cameras, only one has a working light meter, which is different from the camera with the working self-timer. The camera with the self-timer has 1 exposure left on its current roll of film. If Grace shoots 1 self-portrait on the remaining roll and then reloads the camera with a secretly already exposed roll of film, how many legible self-portraits does Grace have after development?
……..
Did you guess one? That’s right!
I was very disappointed to see that the bulk of the self-portraits I shot (I devoted nearly half a roll to this endeavor as I tend to be self-conscious in front of the camera) turned out unusable due to loading ANOTHER previously exposed roll of film that had been missing for nearly a year. How loud my head must whistle when the wind blows! This Four Borough Film Tour taught me, if nothing else, to MARK DIRECTLY ON THE FILM ROLL upon completion, not just the canister.
Blissfully unaware of my mistake, I spent another hour and a half walking around Luna Park’s locked gates and Coney Island’s quiet shores, making real my dream of colorful sunset images on the Portra I had bought myself 6 months before. I walked along the boardwalk as the sun said its nightly goodbyes and let the frigid wind push tears from my eyes because my wool sweater was too rough to push them away myself.
Finally, the world faded from a Prussian blue to a deep purple and my film speeds would no longer serve me, not to mention my light meter being too cold to function. I walked with renewed speed to the waiting D train, which took me most of the way to Dyker Pizza Company. I was joined by my partner for some of the best pizza either of us has had in the city. We had planned to walk around to see Christmas lights but the weight of the day found its way to my head and our warm bed called with open arms.
It’s easy to fall out of the habit of doing things just to do them. There’s so little time between working and resting to use for ourselves. It’s so easy to need everything we do to be exceptional since our time is so fleeting. I often fall away from creating as a form of curiosity in favor of creating as a form of productivity. I hope I can do more things like this to remind myself that not everything has to be perfect or even good to be worthy of doing at all.
