In this particular photo there was something so close to the camera lens that it was rendered indistinguishable as a subject. Instead, this shape became a design element within the picture frame. To me it seemed like Klein was treating reality like a sculptor would a piece of clay, shaping it, instead of simply accepting it as a given and respectfully centering a frame around it.

Then there’s Saul Leiter’s color street work from the ’40s and ’50s. He uses color — and the way that color film renders light — as a shapable object. Roberta Smith’s 2005 review of a Leiter exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery captures the strategy.

In a field as cliche-ridden and seemingly played-out as street photography is, what Leiter did is revelatory.

Maybe it’s because he also paints that he’s able to see and organize color as he does (and as those who pursue only photography often do not). Design Observer recently published an essay on his paintings (there’s an upcoming exhibit of the paintings, in New York).

I wasn’t a student at an art school and I wasn’t working for an arts institution, so I didn’t have any direct involvement with the arts community there…I was just a person interested in the arts (interested in what contemporary artists were doing there, not folk or genre artists). As far as I could figure out, there wasn’t a single gallery showing contemporary art. Was there a gallery district? I couldn’t really locate one.

There were the two branches of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Photographic Art and the art gallery at UCSD…but the history was elusive.

What history was there of artists’ activity, if any? I knew that John Baldessari had lived in National City, just south of San Diego, before lighting out for Cal Arts, but what more, if any, was there?

I guess I was looking for some sense of continuity, to understand what artists had lived and worked in San Diego over the years, what they’d accomplished.

Well, leave it to a Los Angeles art gallery — Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art — (no surprise that it’s not in San Diego) to fill in the historical gaps with their show titled “San Diego and the Origins of Conceptual Art in California.”

The show reports on the role that conceptual artists played teaching at the UCSD art department in the 60s, 70s and beyond (Allan Kaprow taught there from the mid-70s to the mid-90s). I was surprised and pleased to learn that Eleanor Antin photographed parts of her “100 Boots” project in Sorrento Valley, in Northern San Diego, now a solid block of telecom companies’ offices and suburban homes — a place where I’d spent many hours glued to my office chair and laptop screen, sorting out telecom industry stats.

If only I’d known that Antin had worked around there, somehow it would have made being there more interesting.

When I lived in San Diego I always had the weird feeling that those artists (and musicians, etc.) who did live there, would by and large take their talent elsewhere to exhibit, perform, discuss and so on. Maybe that description fits most smaller cities that have artists (primarily ensconced in schools and universities) but that lack a sizable audience to attend exhibitions and events, or collectors to buy work.

I guess that speaks to the need for public interest there to catch up with the interesting projects that the city’s artists are doing. That’s probably as good a definition of a vibrant, cultured city as any definition could be, a community of people actively engaged with the work that the community’s artists are creating.

What a strange situation: to have a core of artists doing such vibrant, cutting-edge work in a larger community for the most part oblivious or indifferent to what they were doing.

The LA Times arts blog Culture Monster provides a brief review.

This 1960s era black and white film (entitled “Let’s Visit a Shopping Center”) takes absolutely nothing for granted. It starts from square one, so that even a visitor from the distant reaches of the Andromeda Galaxy would come away with a clear understanding of the American mall.

The producer of the film — Bernard Wilets — apparently made a number of educational films for children and young adults. That might explain the tone and pacing of the film…Although it’s hard to imagine why children would need to watch an introduction- to-shopping-malls educational film.

BTW, this particular shopping center looks like one I grew up near and spent quite a few hours visiting, in Sherman Oaks, California.

Or “Blowup,” about a fashion photographer, styled after Richard Avedon, one of whose photos inadvertently captures a crime being committed.

Fewer people may have seen “Picture Snatcher,” a Warner Brothers “pre-code” movie (those great, racy films made in the earliest days of sound, before the censorship code caught up with them), starring James Cagney.

The story centers around an ex-convict who decides to go straight by becoming a tabloid photographer, of all things. How straight he actually goes is debatable (and provides a lot of the comedy here, too), because he relies upon many of the same sneaky tactics and contacts he used during his life of crime.

The dramatic highpoint of the story centers on the fictionalized retelling of how Thomas Howard photographed  the execution of Ruth Snyder in New York’s electric chair at Sing Sing. Howard surreptitiously strapped a miniature camera to his ankle and snapped a photo from the death chamber, just as the juice was applied.

The film has most of the familiar tropes we see about photographers. Cagney even says at one point that a camera is just like a gun, with a trigger and everything. It’s a lot of fun, and the photographer storyline is probably the least of it — It’s got car chases, gun molls, snappy dialogue, cops with outrageous Irish brogues, machine gun battles, Lower East Side scenes (via Warner’s back lot). The works!

The photos were taken by presidential press core photgraphers. Although they don’t change my opinion about the quality of the job he did, they do certainly evoke sympathy…especially for the enormous effort it must take to appear alway on-point, in-control and self-assured in the face of cameras.

One of the striking things about this set of images is the range of visual effects on display.

“…shadows, reflections, the unexpected things that happen in an image — the president’s own shadow flanking the seal of the United Nations, the shadow that accompanies Bush and Barack Obama on a walk into the Rose Garden.”

Surely the oddest is a photograph of President Bush walking with President-elect Obama. Obama’s shadow — with an arm extended in a wave to someone off-camera — is visible on a wall behind the men. However, the shadow takes on a pranksterish life of its own…appearing to be waving good-bye to Bush.

It describes — in words and images — how the island of Manhattan looked when Henry Hudson first saw it, 400 hundreds years ago (the 400th anniversary of his voyage is this month).

The book employs some great imaging techniques, like a split view looking north from Wall Street, showing the Westside as it was, all verdant forest, and the Eastside as it is now, all concrete and construction. I thought the Westside looked beautiful…then I felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of all the great architecture in the West Village not there.

Other than the Manhattan waterfront — and even that’s changed dramatically — there are few of the natural contours of the landscape remaining in New York City’s modern form.

Very different from the other cities I’ve lived in (Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego). Those cities were dramatically changed in development, too, but with buildings and roads nonetheless defined by the natural environment.

The book is profiled in today’s New York Times: “Henry Hudson’s View of New York: When Trees Tipped the Sky.”

I was reminded of them when I picked up a copy of a book called The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher (2005).

It’s an infrastructure nerd’s dream-come-true. It takes New York City as a model for explaining how traffic, communications, power, water and freight move through a city. For those of us living in New York, the book helps us understand so many of the inscrutable signs, symbols and objects we see as we walk, drive or subway along.

It does so with a minimum of text and an abundance of very nifty color illustrations, like for example, a timeline of street lamp designs, with the lamps silhouetted. Or, those street repair notes, drawn on the pavement in spray paint by repair crews. Or, an illustration of the underside of a street sweeping truck (a view I’d never like to see, except as an illutration in a book, BTW).

There’s a great page illustrating the most common types of trees in the five boroughs. How about what the most common subway system traffic light signals mean? You’ve got it here.

If you’re looking for a blueprint to help you set up a three-course meal in a subway tunnel, you probably won’t find it here (in any case, I want my three-course meals in a restaurant, not a tunnel). But if you’re looking for a book to help you understand the many things we walk around, over and through that help a city function, this is the book.

Metropolis called the building a forgotten gem of Modernist architecture, and a fine example of green construction principles, too. It is a beauty, and if you worked there I bet it would almost have you getting up a little earlier each morning, just to get to work in such a beautiful office.

I only saw the lobby/atrium (I think the rest of the building is off-limits to people who don’t work there), but the sight of that alone is enough to win you over. The building is constructed from that iconic Modernist material Corten steel and glass. It’s the same steel used by Richard Serra for his sculptures.

The steel develops a rust patina over time and the glass transmits light and offers views of the surrounding buildings. The glass walls surrounding the atrium are ten stories high. The height of the atrium itself is the entire height of the building, with a skylight surrmounting the tropical garden at ground level.

Facing the atrium are a library, reception area, conference rooms and offices,  lit by warm light and offering views of the tropical garden. The entire project was a deliberate effort to avoid a problem with office construction in Midtown: constructing office buildings jammed right up against similar highrises, affording only views of the walls of buildings right adjacent to your own.

You only need to step inside the Ford Foundation Building to see how well it succeeds.

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When I got back to the office I work in, I was surprised to see many similarities with the Ford Foundation Building. They both have a landscaped atrium, both have offices facing the atrium, both have a central skylight…

Why does one succeed so beautifully, and the other not? In part, it’s the materials — The steel, glass and stone of the Ford Foundation are gorgeous. It’s also the proportions. The soaring height of the Ford Foundation adds to the beauty of it. In part it’s the abundance of natural light, which is limited in my own office. And then there are those great views of the surrounding buildings through the high glass walls.

The Ford Foundation, by the way, is adjacent to Tudor City and surrounding neighborhood. It’s a little pocket of a neighborhood at the far end of E. 42nd Street, with an exceptional view of the United Nations building,  one of those neighborhoods that you may never have seen, even if you’ve lived in New York for a long time.

I did hear a lot of birds singing as I walked by the photographer, although I didn’t see anything terribly exotic. Still, it’s good to know that, ornithologically, my commute has something to offer.

“Photographers, critics and scholars have long since concluded that Mr. Frank liberated the photographic image from the compositional tidiness and emotional distance of his predecessors. The ordinary, incidental moments captured in his pictures — and their raw, informal look — paved the way for photographers like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand a decade later…Critics considered the book an indictment of American society, and his pictures did strip away the veneer of breezy optimism reflected in magazines, movies and television programs of the period.”

I look forward to seeing the upcoming exhibit at the National Gallery of Art (Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans) which will feature all of Frank’s contact sheets from The Americans project.