Stray Thoughts: Dad Sold Crack Here

The standard image of New York City is of a buzzing hive filled to bursting, sidewalks full of bustling humans and streets clogged to capacity with honking stop/start automobiles. These are, to honest, very genuine urban experiences but there are many others. There is a very special flavor of meditative solitude that comes from discovering a place or a moment that the city dwellers have abandoned or discarded even if momentarily. Walking an empty Brooklyn street alone near dawn can be a singular experience. A moment shared with the sleeping masses tucked away in the surrounding buildings but simultaneously yours alone. In these moments a trick of the light, an odd angle or viewpoint, an introspective state of mind, can unearth peculiar details and hidden treasures from the detritus of a landscape you may travel through every day. To me Rachael Noel Fox's photo book, Dad Sold Crack Here, captures these moments with a revelatory eye for their bittersweet beauty.

There are very few people in the photos Rachael's collected here and they are rarely the focus of the image. The people that do appear are often distracted, asleep while endlessly waiting or walking speedily out of the frame. Instead what is on display are the remains and resonance the city's inhabitants leave in their wake. Skillfully captured here they are perhaps more revealing than portraits could ever be. Here imperfect patterns rise from the faces of apartment buildings and strike out against the starkness of the sky. Worn brickwork, asphalt and concrete all track the movements of their inhabitants and the passage of time in delicately etched abstractions. Entrance ways for churches, hospitals and nightclubs stand un-entered, there haunting memories and kinetic potentials left intact. Common sights of industrial warnings, forgotten advertisements for phantom products, graffiti both intimate and magnificent all co-mingle across the landscape. Each is reshaped in equal measures by the ware and grind urban progress and reborn in equal glory by the gentle touch of the camera lens.

Some of my favorite images in the book are of alleyways, narrow crevices, forgotten corners and other abandoned spaces that have been reclaimed by a resilient natural element whether it be water, plants, flowers or of course cats. The various cats, along with one rather brazen pigeon, are the primary visible animal presence in this collection. This seems rather fitting to me, as I have always felt that city cats, particularly bodega cats and strays, are really the keepers of the forget places. They know of secret spaces and hidden treasures that, lost in the steam and noise of progress, may have gone untouched by humans for generations, at least until someone with an inquisitive eye and camera at the ready follows one down an alley and into the cities neglected heart bring them back for us all to see.

Buy Dad Sold Crack Here.

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