As a photographer based in Memphis, my work has primarily been from the southern states, but over the past 15 years, I have traveled to New York City on three different weekends, for a total of 12 days. On my last trip which was made on the Y2K,weekend. I also visited Princeton, New Jersey and to my suprise, I was there at the same time as the Reenactment of the Battle of Princeton.
The Y2K trip wasalmost aborted because I had been in bed with the flu in Memphis for 14 days before the trip, but I certainly did not want to miss this historic event, so my then girlfriend, a native New Yorker and I headed for the Memphis International Airport and landed in Newark, bought a bottle of wine in New Jersey and headed for New York City.
We checked into the hotel in Manhattan and then down to the street, bound for Time Square by nightfall. Because of the huge crowd, I got separated from my girlfriend and her family and found myself pushed around by the crowd in my flu weakened state with a heavy photo backpack strapped to my back. But fortune was with me and I drifted towards Time Square along with what I remember as a crowd of three million. This was my third and last time I was ever in New York.
My first was Veteran's Day week-end 1995. Although I was in great health, that weekend, it was a challenge, because after I tipped the taxi driver, as I arrived in Manhattan, I only had $20.00 in my wallet, but I was visiting and staying with a friend from Memphis, in his new Manhattan apartment, so I had a place to stay for next two nights and the third was to be at my girlfriend's parent's house on Long Island.
It was a very productive photography weekend because I was able to shoot about 2000 photos in three days.
My second trip was September 8-12, 2000, to celebrate my daugher's September 10, birthday. This trip could have been taken the next year, but wasn't.
As fate would have it, by going in 2000, we avoided going the next year and being at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
We were there early morning, September 11, 2000. Eerily, my son Cody, who was eight years old at the time ask when we got to the roof, "Dad, what would happen if a plane crashed into the building", and I said, "That wouldn't happen because these buildings are so high that they would see it and turn away". How wrong could I have been?
The images that I have posted on this site are some of my favorites from my 12 days spent in NYC and Princeton. I am hoping to have a show in Princeton at the end of 2009, but I will post if it becomes a more firm engagement.
I am primarily inspired by the Symbolist or Pictorialist Photographers from the turn of the 20th Century.
My favorite photographers are Eduard Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence White, J.Craig Annan, Alfred Steiglitz, Jacques-Henri Latrigue, Joseph Sudek, André Kertész, then later favorites are Ernst Haas, Yoshikazu Shirakawa, Sarah Moon and David Hamilton.
Linked closely to my photography is my music which has always been a backdrop to my photography. I hear it in my mind as I photograph. With this going on my senses become heightened and I feel electrified, chills race up my back to my neck and face, then down my arms the shutter clicks and I know that I've got something. Something that may make the music play in your mind, too!
Alan Peeler
July, 2009
