(All Photos by Allen Quiles, “Pins in my ears to make me better looking. Didn’t work. But they did match my frames.”)
Fast links to my Allen Quiles Photo Review Series:
The Shooting Habits of Allen Quiles
If there is anyone who shoots with an almost religious regiment, Allen Quiles is one of them. By the time I start writing this article, Allen have already posted more than five thousand photos on his Instagram. By the time this article is published, I expect the number to steadily grow.
(Shooting while Driving, Do Not Recommend”)
(“No Lines at the Golden Crust Tonight”)
He shoots rain or shine too. His album is like a weather history of the Northern Bronx. He does not miss a shot no matter if it happens on a rainy day or a sunny day. As a matter of fact, he has a special fondness for the weather too. It almost seems that the sky, the changing of weather, the moving of clouds, the variance of sun in the course of a day, provided him a well of stories that never runs dry.
(“North Central Bronx Hospital, Shooting with Kado”)
It is curious how someone's inspiration never runs dry. A writer sometimes hits their block. A poet occasionally runs out of words. A painter runs out of pigment from time to time, but Allen Quiles’ DSLR never runs out of memory or battery. It just shoots and shoots and shoots. Last week when I was interviewing Allen, he took me around his neighborhood in the Bronx, and I got to see how an Allen photo is made. In the making of this photo which he dubbed “North Central Bronx Hospital, Shooting with Kado”, he stopped me on the pedestrian walk half way into East 210th St and said to me somewhat to the effect while he was preparing his camera and aiming his shot:
“I have to take a photo here. 10 steps forward, the tree is going to get into the way and it is annoying. Now the roof, and the kind of boring symmetrical stepping down structure, that's a story for me. I’ll adjust the exposure range from +5 to -5 for this weather and take a shot. It should capture what I wanted to show. My eyes are not that sharp anymore. So I’ll crop it when I get home. And sometimes when I get home, there will be a pedestrian, a dog, or something showing up in the side of my photo, and that would be a nice surprise for me that I did not intend.”
Of course, apparently, it happened so that there was no nice surprise on the side of the road when he was taking this photo. The photo was cropped to highlight just the structure of the roof of the hospital. But it seems that he enjoys this interaction between intention and surprise that was the inevitable condition for urban landscaping.
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Just as it seems that Allen enjoys this dynamic between expectation and surprise, so does it seems that his album is a mix between repetition and diversity. What do I mean by that? Take these two buildings for example. These two buildings, which apparently are affordable housings raised in the 70s, repeatedly appeared on his Instagram. But Allen manages to find ways to tell a new story about them depending on the day, the time of the day, the weather of that day, and his location in relation to the buildings. In the first photo, I doubt that he had intended so vividly for the trees to vine around the photo as the affordable housings sat so menacingly against the sublime sunset. Just as I doubt that he had intended the reflection of the sunset to faintly hue off the edge of the affordable housing as he looked upwards in the second photo.
Later on, I learned that the two buildings are the third and fourth tallest buildings in the Bronx. They are the Tracy Towers. No matter looking at it up close or from afar, it is impossible to ignore how eyesore the Tracy Towers stood out against the level landscape of Northern Bronx. Paul Rudolf, the Chairman of the Architectural Department of Yale, designed and built the Tracy Tower in 1972. Paul Rudolf’s design is inspired, if ugliness can also be inspired just like beauty can be inspired, by the “city in the air” concept that was popular among Tokyo architects of the time. The concept of “city in the air” is an effort to find vertical space for the highly concentrated urban environment. The Bronx, unlike Manhattan, never fully lived out this type of vertical urban development. But buildings such as the Tracy Tower that stood out over the rest of the landscape, symbolizes the tug of war of the wish and wants of the Bronx, whose vision for a future doesn’t always coincide with one another.
May 22, 2023
Kado
Photo by Allen Quiles//@goinpeacecapturetheworld