Tokyo

After being diverted overnight to Hokkaido by Hurricane Roke, I arrived in Tokyo last night with 2 hours to hang 33 pictures in my booth at Tokyo Photo 2011! Thanks to some great help from my translator/assistants we made it, but there was not a second to check out the other booths, which I will make up for shortly.

In the meantime, I always enjoy my hotel views. This is clearly not so picturesque but looking out of my window in the Nagatacho district I feel like I'm already enveloped in a contemporary Japanese photograph.

Fashion Week

As Fashion Week in New York comes to a close - a great aerial shot of the backstage preparations from London's Daily Mail. Unfortunately the photograph is only credited to Getty Images so I can't give the resourceful photographer their due credit. Please write in if you know.

Save The Date - September 15

Gloria Swanson, 1924.

You're all invited to our opening show of the season. Thursday, 6 to 8 p.m..

The show features 80 iconic Edward Steichen 8x10 contact prints made by the renowned photographer George Tice who was Steichen's last printer. In addition to the Steichens we are showing 12 rarely seen George Tice photographs in our Print Room, and George - who is truly one of photography's living legends as well as an incredibly nice guy - will be there. More on George later.

Gary Cooper, 1928.

VOGUE Fashion. 1920s.

Gertrude Lawrence, 1928.

Charlie Chaplin, 1928.

9/12

I have mixed feelings about the proliferation of 9/11 images that have flooded the airwaves and print media these past few days. Nearly every story and image is powerful and moving but at a certain point you can begin to feel you're being used.

I was looking for a photograph that meant something more than re-visiting the past when Len Prince sent me this picture. It's an iPhone snap of a contact sheet that he had never tried to print or publish but ten years later the picture makes a lot of sense.

It was taken on 9/12/01 near Ground Zero and is of the back window of a smashed-up police car that had been blown on top of another car. Someone had scrawled the date in the dust of 9/11 as both a record and - I like to think - a hope. 9/11 as we know changed everything, but it's what we do with 9/12 that counts.

For a moment it seemed like 9/12 had brought about an amazing togetherness and spirit in this country, but it didn't take long to disintegrate and go awry. Let's try to make this 9/12 something better.

Irene

Of all the snaps I've taken, this one seems to provoke the most visceral response!

It was taken around noon on August 28th as Hurricane Irene hit the south shore of Long Island. It's the view from the living room of our house on The Great South Bay, and amazingly, the water stopped about 1/4 inch short of flooding the house. What you see in this picture is The Great South Bay, and then what little lawn we have between the house and the bay.

We were very lucky.