Photographs Capture A Day In The City Life

Carnival lights glowing in the mist. A young man sweeping a basketball court. Downtown’s skyline under gray clouds. A truck, blinker blazing, making a left at an intersection.

These images and a couple hundred more were taken between 12 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. on June 17 as part of New Haven Photo Day, and succeed in the project’s goal of creating ​“a broad portrait of New Haven on that day.”

The project — a collaboration among photographer Chris Randall, Creative Arts Workshop, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and the city’s Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism — sent teams of photographers across the city from early morning to late at night to capture as much as they could of New Haven on that day, from its architecture, to the art projects and concert on the Green that happened that day, to the work going on in a Fair Haven bakery. (See the Independent’s previous story about that here.) In addition, the organizers behind New Haven Photo Day encouraged people who just happened to take pictures that day to submit their own photos.

On July 3, I Love New Haven, the ongoing photography project founded by Randall and fellow photographer Jeffrey Kerekes, selected 30 of the images to post on its website. An exhibition of some of the printed photos is in the works. But meanwhile, all of the photos submitted for the project appear on New Haven Photo Day’s own website, and it’s there that we can all see the city reflected back at us.

Some images are instantly familiar. There’s the display of arrivals and departures at Union Station, the letters on top of the Omni Hotel lit up at night, the lighthouse at Lighthouse Point, Judges Cave atop West Rock. But even these landmarks carry the specificity of the day itself. The weather on June 17, it turns out, wasn’t postcard perfect. It was overcast. It rained, and when the rain stopped, it never quite dried out. Later, there was mist. That specificity matters. It makes the project less about beautification than observation.

In some images, observation is the subject itself. One photograph shows a photographer, dressed all in black except for a striking red coat tied around his waist, taking a picture of a woman in a white gown in a gallery in the Yale Center for British Art. There are selfies. Three women smile into the lens, the background bright behind them. Another woman stands in front of a train on a platform at Union Station, the sky already dark.

There’s even a picture of four women in a kitchen, all smiling into the camera of a phone that one of them is holding up above them. The photographer’s capturing that moment makes it more intimate. It almost feels a little intrusive. But mostly it feels like a gift, to be present for the second that the four subjects came close together to have their picture taken with each other. A second earlier or later, and we wouldn’t have seen it.

That essential fact jumps out of so many of the other images as well. There’s the shot taken from the front seat of a vehicle crossing the Q Bridge at night — its towers lit up in blue that evening — the lines on the road streaked by speed. Another shot shows a motorcycle parked in front of the Hotel Duncan at an angle that suggests it wasn’t there for very long. A shutter clicked as kids at a baseball game lined up to slap hands.

Another one snapped as a girl walked along the water’s edge by a dock, dragging a stick behind her through the rocky sand. And in the same house where the four women gathered in the kitchen, we learn there was a birthday party for a young boy. Its theme was Superman.

Perhaps to some it’s an obvious, simple thing, to document the passage of time. But that doesn’t make it any less affecting. Tempus sure as hell fugit, doesn’t it? And for one day, we got to be just a little more aware of that, and to savor those impermanent details, whether it was the crust on a freshly baked loaf of bread, a stoop sale of kids’ clothes and toys in front of an apartment house, a young dancer doing a split in the air, or photographers taking a picture of their own feet — a pair of sneakers with pink shoelaces on a sidewalk drying after a light rain. The pictures make the details matter more, and remind us that maybe they always do, whether we capture them or not.