Blog Posts by Subject: Photography

Currently on display at the St. George Library Center is a photo exhibit by photojournalist Sri Walpola, "A Taste of Home: Cooking Sri Lankan in New York." We sat down with him for a brief interview.

What inspired "A Taste of Home: Cooking Sri Lankan in New York"?

Since my arrival in New York, I started cooking. I started looking for Sri Lankan ingredients first, and then I started cooking with the help of my mother and both my sisters via the telephone because all of them are in Sri Lanka.

As I listen to Block Ice & Propane, I recall the other possible uniform title I considered for this blog thread: “Prone to Hyperbole”; because this collection of songs may be the most evocative set of music the universe has ever heard!

Who hasn't had a fascination with a camera?  Mine was long ago with an Olympus when I was young and snobbish and only snapped black and white.  Perhaps the most successful series was Medicine Cabinets, sometimes taken surreptiously.  My two favorites were those of my friend F___ , whose didn't change, at all, from year to year, and that of a cataloger.  I don't even remember her name, but aspirin was in the upper left and Zantac in the lower right.  



In our work at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, we regularly come across public school educators who believe that they are not supposed to talk about religion in the classroom. On the contrary, we feel that teachers can and should teach about religion.

Would you like to learn how to knit or improve your bird watching skills? The DeWitt Wallace Periodicals Division currently holds over 100 hobbies and leisure activities magazines for hobbyists, amateurs and enthusiasts alike.  

New York in the 1970s, without cellphones, the internet, globalization, etc., was a very different place and arguably more vibrant (though I'm glad Central Park isn't like it used to be.)  Photographer extraordinaire Peter Moore tirelessly went about the City capturing just about everyone and everything, and became particularly known for his thorough photojournalism of the avant-garde scene, which included such influential groups as Fluxus and the Judson Dance Theater.  Tuesday will feature one facet of this multi-talented man's enormous body of work—The Avant Garde Festivals of Charlotte Moorman.

Katarina Bishop grew up all over Europe, but she isn’t an heiress. She has a Faberge egg, but she isn’t a Romanov. Kat is used to looking at a room and seeing all the angles, but that was before she stole a whole other life at the Colgan School only to walk away from it months later without a trace.

That was before everything went sideways.

Harlem is an iconic place, a fabled community, a vibrant hub of African-American culture and pride known the world over. Its essence has been captured in music—"Take the A Train" by Duke Ellington, in literature—The Street by Ann Petry and photography—Art Kane's 1958—"Great Day in Harlem" and in many photos by famed photographer James Van Der Zee.

Harlem and Aguilar CRW students gathered at the Zora Neale Hurston Room of the Harlem Library on Friday May 28 for their debut as budding photographers of the CRWs of the NYPL. Students browsed the exhibit before guests arrived and were thrilled to see their photos mounted on the exhibit wall of the immense community room.

Students in the CRW Photography Workshop brought in objects which held personal significance for them. We spent some time writing about these objects and then went into the garden to take some portraits of each other posed with our special objects.

Have you got a few minutes? Good, because once you open these books, you’re going to want to keep flipping through.

A class field trip to El Museo del Barrio inspires the students' creativity.

This past Friday, the group shared their dreams in front of the class. They shared dreams that they had during sleep, as well as those that they hope to achieve.

What a portrait can tell us?
by Judith Aisen

Billy said that portraits “portray” things about people and Keith said they give you a little history.  We shared written “portraits” of friends and relatives but some of our liveliest conversations were inspired by a film about the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who spoke about working quietly, like a cat, to capture people in their own habitat.  We talked about HC-B trying to, “put the camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.”

We brought in photos from our family album.  We observed the different attributes of a photo, such as setting, background, light and subject.  We wrote about the family photo and shared it with the class.  Photography lets us remember the good moments and brings us wonderful memories!

"Smile! I want to take your portrait...It's too dark over here.... Is this a stolen portrait?" were some of the comments heard on Friday, March 26 at the Aguilar Branch when adult students from Aguilar and Harlem Centers for Reading and Writing rose from their seats to show off what they had just learned about portraits: consider the mood, the setting, the lighting, the point of view and the subject!

The 2009 World Series brings together two cities uncommonly rich in baseball history. Though you might guess which team NYPL is rooting for this year, we've posted a selection of images on The Commons on Flickr representing a variety of New York and Philadelphia ball clubs of yore.

Staff of the New York Public Library recently hand picked a set of nearly 500 images, collected from across our Digital Gallery, composing them as a curated set of images at the Commons on Flickr. They represent the Hudson River Valley through several hundred years of history and complement Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, now up in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.