Bad Moon/Code Sun

Introduction

As those who have seen my other photobooks know, I take photos on the street, mostly in New York City. In early March, when the novel coronavirus pandemic began to close the city, my wife and I headed upstate to ride out the worst of it. As I always do, I brought along my camera.

The first question: What would I shoot? I’m used to subwaying about the city, toting my camera everywhere, grabbing shots on trains, in crowds, often in the middle of Times Square, following the street photographer’s creed: Get close … no, get closer.

There were no more crowds in NYC, just empty streets. There were no crowds up here in Woodstock, nothing but nature.

What would I shoot? Especially confined by stay-at-home orders.

Well, I felt safe on my small plot of soil, so for starters I shot in my front yard, or out my window.

For the last few months before we got here I’d been playing around with this glass crystal thing, floating it up tight before the lens, then twisting and turning it. What I saw through my viewfinder was splintered, fractured, blurred, yet erupting in intense color. Each turn of the crystal was different, always surprising, usually spooky and fascinating, frightening and lovely.

I’d used the crystal to good effect in the city, especially in my recent book War Horse. Quickly I realized this was exactly what I needed up here.

I’ve never, as a photographer, been very interested in seeing what’s actually there, what everyone else sees. In the city I want that unexpected angle on street life, that glint or flush of emotion, that clash or harmony of color, all evanescent yet timeless, which when I’m quick enough I can capture. But up here there was only the natural world, trees, bushes, sky everyone can see.

That’s not what I wanted. At bottom, I’m most interested in taking pictures of what nobody can see. A world that, with grace and good fortune, my camera can catch glimpses of, and I can render into something actual and real.

A photo.

Here those unreal real photos came with a wave and dab of my crystal. The spiky crystal stick was like a brush for me, a painter’s brush, drawing this lurking natural world before my lens, an extension of both my own inner visions and the new, blighted world we’d all fallen into.

There was one especially wondrous quality to the way my crystal shard danced before my lens. Each minute turn, twist, shiver, and thrust of the crystal, or dip and sway of my camera, brought a new vision, wide in variety and reach, even with the same trees or clouds or lake before me. From moment to moment I never knew what I’d see. Even confined to my yard, or the few places we felt safe enough to walk, the camera rendered these small canvases in nearly infinite ways.

Which made my main job to click the shutter at the ideal moment. Often this was a guess, a hope, a whim. Whether any of my photos worked at all was only revealed later. That was one of the joys of what I’ve been up to, the way the world conspired with my camera to reveal itself in new ways.

Another joy, it turned out, was being forced to work in such a small realm. I could no longer tire of Times Square and hop the subway out to Queens. I was stuck in my front yard, or down the road at a rail trail along the reservoir.

Where I kept finding that each minute gesture could unlock an unexpected truth. Each flickering twist could draw up, then capture a new world.

Which makes me think of the poet William Carlos Williams, whose “The Red Wheelbarrow,” in which “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens” (the complete poem), might be the key to all great photography.

* * * * *

Bad Moon/Code Sun is my first Covid-19 diary, followed by Surf’s Up and Ragged and Dirty. Not shots of hauntingly empty streets, nor streets suddenly filled with BLM protests, but photographs from the countryside. It stretches from March to July 2020. The title comes from my first thought about the coronavirus crisis, there truly was a Bad Moon Rising (quick nod to John Fogerty). But not just that. I learned from the news that when a patient left an NYC hospital cured of the virus, the medical staff called it not Code Blue, as in a dire emergency, but Code Sun … and the staff would play the Beatles song “Here Comes the Sun.”

Despair and hope. Nature and not-nature. The familiar and the underside of the familiar. Terror and joy.

It’s been harrowing months everywhere. There will be plenty of books that depict the events of this time directly, with power and historical moment.

Bad Moon/Code Sun is less direct. It’s after the essence of what’s going on, the way nature itself is darkly expressing itself, and the emotions that followed, the fears, the nightmares, the endless post-midnight trembles … yet always the dream of all the darkness passing. I hope the book resonates with you as much as it does with me.