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I worked with a great figure model named Bella Bianca (MM#1017976) who arrived yesterday at my studio with her chihauha, who was so well behaved I put him in the pics too.
I lived in the Bronx when I was going to college at Fordham University not far from where Bella is now located, and working with her brought it back to me how great the Bronx and its people really are. Bella was down to earth, a lot of fun to photograph and totally professional.
The best book ever written about NYC, Gotham surprises, not so much for its wealth of detail as for its delineation of the class struggle between the urban poor and the wealthy landowners and industrialists who have, since Dutch times, sought to rule the city and impose their vision on the underpaid workers who built New York in the first place. New York was never, even its earliest days, a sleepy small town that was built up into a metropolis. Rather, it was always, as it is now, one of the world's great centers of commerce that constantly marginalized the Irish, Germans and Afro-American lower classes and put them down violently when they attempted to assert their rights. No one who reads this book should be surprised that the current mayor is a billionaire who overrode popular referendums on term limits, who bought his office by having spent more than one hundred milliondollars in his election campaigns and who constantly has strongarmed the City Council into supporting his initiatives for big business, no matter how detrimental those initiatives might be to the well being of New York's lower and middle classes.
As far as I could learn from talking to the drivers, the many antique cars at the Veterans' Day Parade were all privately owned by the veterans themselves.
Although I often disagree vehemently with politicans who begin wars, I have the highest respect for those who have served in the Armed Forces and risked their lives to keep Americans safe.
