THE sky from bedstuy
2020: When COVID-19 turned all our lives outside in, my roof became an important space in my isolation. Living alone, and suddenly without work or routine, my daily sneak up a scrappy ladder brought me to an open sky, where I could sit with our city. I found great solace here. Early on, I swore our sky was echoing both our fears, inner turmoil, and outer rage. This view continues to show me endless variation, and as soon as I think, “oh! I know this one…” the wind, a balloon, or a contrail upends my expectations.
I feel a certain magic in the drift of our rotation, on and on, where this perpetual field of color becomes a partner to my anxieties, aches, and delights. I’m learning that watching the sky requires a certain patience and full-body listening that so many of us are no longer conditioned for. It would be impossible to share the original time in the stretches of color. These captures, in time-lapse, meet me halfway. Halfway between the impulse to scroll and post and stream, and my deeper tug to honor our circadian rhythms. I do seek togetherness in this chaotic reality— and early on in the Pandemic, that connection felt only available in digital space— unfolding hot under glass, and battery-powered in my palm. My little camera phone struggles to understand the fragile and fleeting spectrum, but it does its best. With that, my countless hours have been condensed into seconds; a seemingly simple sky flip-book—- a tiny time machine.
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I intend to create a backlog of all my time-lapses from March, April, May… November— and so on. The world waking up, relearning, slowing down, an uprising, sirens, curfews, a month of fireworks, storms, and summer resilience. It was a very special summer here in New York City. While they are not ‘here’ yet, some of them are indeed my favorites. A selection is available here, in my archived stories, and I hope to publish them en masse soon, in calendar form. Meanwhile, time keeps churning out surprises.
Browse my current and future captures. Not daily, and not always from my roof, I’ll share patches of theskyfrombedstuy in the days of pandemic.
A new show! Every night!
“The first impression of that extraordinary spectacle is strangely overcoming. Ordinarily to look at the sky for any length of time is impossible. Pedestrians would be impeded and disconcerted by a public sky-gazer. What snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and churches, serve as a background for man, signify wet weather or fine, daub windows gold, and, filling in the branches, complete the pathos of dishevelled autumnal plane trees in autumnal squares. Now, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it! — this incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting of clouds together, and drawing vast trains of ships and waggons from North to South, this incessant ringing up and down of curtains of light and shade, this interminable experiment with gold shafts and blue shadows, with veiling the sun and unveiling it, with making rock ramparts and wafting them away…
It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal — that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out.”