(All photos by Allen Quiles, “1971 Nikon F Kodak 400 film. Gathering a Tibbetts Brook park.”)
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Fast links to my Allen Quiles Photo Review Series:
A Man of and from the Bronx
From Allen’s album, it is almost impossible to say if the out of place character of his photo comes from his charming character, or is some kind of reality of the Bronx seeping through. Allen is a man from and of the Bronx. He grew up in the Bronx, went to NYU for education, and then returned to the Bronx as he developed a career as an occupational therapist. Married in the Bronx, and raised his children in the Bronx. When we walk the streets of the Mosholu neighborhood, Allen knows the story of every building; when was the edict of this building renovated, who lives in that building their entire life, and when did someone leave the neighborhood 10 years ago.
That lifelong drift towards the Bronx shows from his Photos as well. In the 2 mile radius around Mosholu where he shoots the majority of his photos, there are wild lives in the Van Cortlandt Park and traffic islands of Mosholu Parkway; the urban center of Northern Bronx provided him with endless materials of street stories; a strange combination of buildings and architecture consisted his urban landscape collections; and the local events where he shoots as an hired gun, most of the time knowing the people of the events to various capacities.
When he took me around the neighborhoods of Mosholu, I saw the architectural reality where the charm of his photos came from. Starting from the Montefiore Hospital Campus, the Victorian style town hall immediately abuts an bricked administrative building raised in the 50s. Behind the pair of the suddenly conjoined buildings is a modern glassed-riser towering over the two. The medical campus of Montefiore sits on top of the hill of Gun Hill. Immediately outside of the strange Acropolis that is the campus of Montefiore Hospital are the pre-Civil War lofty Bavarian town houses, joined by plain faced affordable housings raised between the 50s and 70s. The contrasting style of Bavarian and eclectic are connected halfway and rings around the medical campus. Beyond the central ring that sits on top of the hill is the elevated 4 line subway, the commercialized Jerome Ave, and Van Cortlandt Park that rest on the low periphery of the hill. Far down the hill are the Tracy Towers.
Flipping through all 5 thousand photos on Allen’s Instagram, you cannot find a single long shot that captures the entire urban scenery of the hill of Mosholu (he does occasionally take long shots for urban scenery that came with an wide and open view, but not for Mosholu). No matter from what angle you’re looking at, it is very hard to make sense of what you’re seeing, especially if you live in the neighborhood and notice the many nuances and subtleties of the neighborhood. No matter how hard a photographer tries to capture the entire sight, there is always something missing or something being omitted in a long-shot taken from a vantage point.
("Old and New Architecture”)
As we walked by the Victorian Town Hall that is the front of the Montefiore Hospital, I made the comment:
“Wow, the town hall is smashed against the affordable housing.”
He said to me something to the effect: “The town hall is the Montefiore Hospital, and, nope, the one right next to it is the administration building of the Hospital, not affordable housing.” As he aimed his camera to take this photo of the town hall and the glass-riser (the administration building is not shown in this photo). When I saw this photo on Instagram that night, I felt proud that I might have inspired Allen to take this photo, especially from this angle where the glass riser peeps over the town hall in that restless manner. But it turns out I was wrong again.
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Allen had taken a few photos of the glass riser long before we met. The peeping glass-riser occasionally shows up in his album from time to time, neither did I inspire the angle of the shot.
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All of the photos of this glass-riser were taken as a close up with the street cropped out from the photos. I wonder if the angle of these glass-riser shots are intentional or instinctive. I wonder if he intentionally took these photos from a dazing upward angle to show how inappropriate the glass-riser pokes over the rest of the neighborhood, or if it's that, without cropping the street from the images, the contrast between different architectural styles is too drastic to retain any artistic unity.
Later on, I would learn that the glass-riser is the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore.
If you like Allen’s photo, check out his Instagram to see all 5000 of them. If you enjoy reading my review, feel free to share it with your friends.
June 4, 2023
Kado
Photo by Allen Quiles//@goinpeacecapturetheworld