Photographs Show The City Again

In one photograph among the six grouped together, the picture is just of a brick wall. But the diagonal light both sparks the existing pattern in the masonry and makes it more complicated. Those strong diagonals then make their appearance again, but this time as an architectural feature. Then it happens again, only now the diagonal is pure shadow, of a spiked fence, with a bicycle and a hydrant to bear witness.

“It was one of those bright. sunny days,” said photographer Roderick Topping of the first image. The light drew his eye to the pattern in the brickwork. But as the photographs in the open-air show at Studio Duda on Wooster Street show, Topping’s eye is drawn to the details of the Elm City nearly everywhere in town he goes. His camera lets us see what he sees; he shows us the city again.

Topping — whose photos will be visible on the exterior of Studio Duda for the next month — has been taking photographs since he was 10 years old. He did some professional photography work in the 1990s, but ​“since then the photography has been for my own gratification,” he said. He had planned a regular gallery show in the summer, which was cancelled due to the pandemic. When Paul Duda, who runs Studio Duda, offered him the outside walls of his studio, ​“I jumped on it,” Topping said.

Most of the photographs in the exhibit are ​“vignettes of life in New Haven,” he said, with a few other locations mixed in — La Guardia airport, or a fruit stand in New York City. He took most of the images in the past five years. All of them are black and white, and square, and have a way of referring to one another. Topping learned to take photographs in black and white early and ​“I’ve thought in black and white ever since,” he said. He’s drawn to it because it seems to him more like a ​“shadow of reality than a representation of it.” He also hasn’t lost the habits he learned when shooting with film. ​“Film really disciplines you as a photographer,” he said. In the age of digital photography, one can take a thousand photos and pick the best; with film, ​“before you take a picture, you think about it.”

When a particular scene draws his eye, Topping aims to ​“capture it in such a way that people might take a second look,” he said. That second look can even happen in memories. In the first group of pictures, the piece of the logo from the Bilco Company in West Haven is instantly identifiable. In the lower right corner above, there’s an island in a stream that, after a moment, is recognizable as from the Mill River when it curves below the summit of East Rock. The double arches aren’t from Yale; they’re from the castle on the summit of Sleeping Giant State Park.

He has also found solace in his art practice during the Covid-19 outbreak. Topping lives by himself in the Dwight neighborhood, and ​“this whole project has been respite from the social confinement,” he said. Wearing his mask, he goes out and takes pictures, day and night. He did a series of photographs of New Haven at night that captured the quietness of what are normally busy streets. Without people on the sidewalks, cars on the roads, ​“I find I’m seeing things, noticing details in architecture. I’m paying more attention to actual structures in the city than I used to,” he said. Recently he noticed an archway between two of the buildings on College Street. ​“I’ve lived in this city for 30 years and how I never noticed it is beyond me,” he said. ​“I’ve noticed all these things I never appreciated before. It’s a beautiful town in its quirky way.”

But Topping also finds the beauty in it; in the way he sees patterns in the urban landscape, you might say he sees the way the city rhymes. In the two right-hand images, his eye catches a similar angle in the shadow of a post falling across the facade of the Yale School of Architecture and in the line the curb makes on another street. Both have single pedestrians; the canine in the lower right is, in fact, Duda’s dog.

Paul Duda, who runs Studio Duda, has been a professional photographer for over three decades and a photography teacher at Education Center for the Arts for 25 years, has a personal connection to Topping; ​“he was the first guy to get a cup of coffee at Book Trader,” which Duda’s brother, Dave, runs. But Duda also considers Topping’s photographs to be ​“a celebration of the little things in New Haven — the small places, the small connections. What better guy to kick this off?”

“He just has a way of capturing the tiny, unseen fact of light,” Duda said, ​“the way forms accidentally come together.” To Duda, Topping’s images are ​“less about subject than they are about form, line, and composition.”

Topping’s photographs are the first of what Duda hopes will be a series of outdoor shows featuring one artist’s work each month, and he’s interested in exploring the format. As long as he can print the pieces more or less as he printed Topping’s images, he’ll be able to show it. And there’s plenty of foot traffic.

“Wooster Street never really closed,” Duda said. Most of the restaurants have been functioning in some capacity since the pandemic began. To one side of Studio Duda there’s a package store, where, ​“trust me, there’s a line there,” Duda said. On the other side is Pepe’s, and ​“there’s a line there…. There’s so many people down here every single day. They’ve seen their family enough,” and ​“the same art on their walls every single day.”

Duda said that the pickup in foot traffic on Wooster Street has been ​“massive” with the reopening. ​“I was a little annoyed for a while, it was so crowded,” he said, although he also felt that the norms of social distancing were still being followed. ​“People have been separating themselves in the park, having their pizza,” he said. He also reported that Pepe’s has also instituted a system whereby they’ve numbered the spots in their parking lot and distributed takeout orders according to those numbers.

“This crazy Italian neighborhood has stayed open with good ideas for how to keep us safe and not let us go without,” Duda said.

By turning the sidewalk in front of his studio into a gallery, Duda knows he’s changing the game a little. People ​“choose to walk into a gallery,” he said; now, he has made it ​“accidental.” But getting people to slow their stride as they walk down Wooster Street parallels a larger point.

Before the pademic, Duda felt our way of living was ​“set up for us to work too much and forget as much as possible…. I’m hoping we don’t go back to the rat race,” he said. He has noticed people being kinder to each other during the pandemic; even the act of wearing a mask is really about thinking of others, not protecting yourself. Now, he said, ​“we are understanding what a moment in time is. We can sit on a bench and think: light and leaves do that?” And of Topping’s images, he said, ​“here’s a guy who’s going to help you see it.”