Month: October 2026

West 48th

West 48th, August 1979

Q; hey Grok, can you tell me the location of this photo in NYC?

A: West 48th Street in Midtown Manhattan (Theater District / near Times Square), New York City.

The street sign in the upper right of the frame clearly reads “W 48 ST” (with a bike-lane sign below it), along with the typical NYC regulatory signs for a tow-away zone and clear fire lane. The surrounding scene—dense midtown buildings, busy sidewalk, classic Coca-Cola “Enjoy” storefront sign, vertical projecting “CAST” sign, and the overall streetscape—places it squarely in the West 48th Street corridor between roughly 6th/7th Avenues and Broadway, the heart of the Theater District.

The black-and-white film look (plus the clothing, car, and overall feel) suggests a mid-to-late 20th-century shot, but the location markers are unambiguous.

Amber Lara

musicians
joy

Amber Lara is a New York City based contemporary jazz performer, composer and arranger specializing in saxophones and flute. She is recognized for her commanding presence and distinctive sound, often incorporating indigenous and Latin elements within her arrangements
Amber Lara residency every Sunday night from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. at Epistrophy 200 Mott Street, NY NY email: info@epistrophynyc.com

Maria Martins

This is Maria Martins’s *The Impossible, III* (1946), a bronze in MoMA’s collection, currently on view on the fifth floor in gallery 500. It is about 31½ by 32½ by 21 inches.
Martins (born Maria de Lourdes Alves, 1894–1973) was a Brazilian sculptor. She grew up in Campanha, studied music, then took up sculpture while living abroad with her husband, the diplomat Carlos Martins Pereira e Sousa. In New York in the 1940s she learned bronze casting from Jacques Lipchitz, showed with the Surrealists, and was taken up by André Breton, who linked her writhing, plantlike forms to Amazonian myth. She bought Mondrian’s *Broadway Boogie Woogie* and later gave it to MoMA.
She made several versions of this sculpture between 1944 and 1949, in different sizes and materials. MoMA’s label quotes her directly: “It is nearly impossible to make people understand each other.” The fuller remark she used for the work was “The world is complicated and sad—it is nearly impossible to make people understand each other.”
The two figures are usually read as male and female. Their bodies touch and lean into one another, but the spikes that erupt from their heads stop short of meeting. MoMA describes that as an embrace that is both opposition and attraction — desire and refusal at once. A *Time* reviewer, seeing a plaster version in 1946, said it looked like “a disagreement between two anthropomorphic snowstorms.”
Later writers have also tied the title to her affair with Marcel Duchamp, which began around the year she made this piece. She was married to the Brazilian ambassador and had no intention of divorcing; Duchamp later used her as the model for the nude in *Étant donnés*. That reading is interpretive. What she herself said the sculpture was about is the near-impossibility of two people actually understanding each other.–Grok

I heard from Anuj Agarwal, the Creators Account Manager and Founder of FeedSpot letting me know that the Black and White blog was selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 10 Black and White Photography Blogs on the web (2026 Edition).
The Internet has evolved since B&W was started in 1996. I am not a fan of social media where we are all the product. I deeply appreciate Feedspot’s recognition and encourage all to view websites maintained by people who don’t collect and sell your information. Thanks Anuj!

 

nine out of ten

3 men at MoMA
three men

The number of people walking through life with a phone in their hands is high, the Pew Research Center provides numbers. Nine out of ten have a smart-phone, 98 out of 100 some type of mobile phone. This trio reflects  the age related aspect of mobile ownership,  old people learned about maps and arithmetic.

day of rest

van w/ messages about God and Jesus printed on side
Repent!

你百分之百确信自己能上天堂吗？
我们若说自己没有罪，便是自欺，真理不在我们心里了。（约翰一书 1:10）
请
悔改
因为凡
求告主名的，就必得救。（罗马书 10:13）
今天就祈求主耶稣基督救你脱离地狱的火！
主耶稣基督为像你一样的罪人而死。
因为罪的工价乃是死；惟有神的恩赐，在我们的主基督耶稣里，乃是永生。（罗马书 6:23）
记住：耶稣能拯救！
既从罪里得了释放，就作了义的奴仆。

Are you 100% sure you will go to heaven?
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. John 1:10
Please
REPENT
For whosoever
Shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved Rom. 10:13
ASK THE LORD JESUS CHRIST TO SAVE YOU FROM HELL FIRE TODAY!
The Lord Jesus Christ died for sinners just like you.
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Rom. 6:23
Remember Jesus saves!
Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.

 

 

one of Roberts Moses roads

east river view from FDR
This is a color photograph made on a grey day. Looking across the East River from the FDR.

Moses shared the prejudices of his class and time, and poor neighborhoods were not where he spent political capital.
Writer Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) fought to save neighborhoods. SoHo and the Village were not cleared but they didn’t stay working-class. Moses displaced the poor with a bulldozer. The market, in the neighborhoods he was stopped from touching, displaced the poor with outrageously expensive real estate.
Moses poured concrete when American cities were desperate for parks, bridges, and roads, and he treated the people in the way as a cost of getting the job done. The roads he finished still carry traffic.
The neighborhoods Jacobs helped preserve are a reason lower Manhattan is a place worth caring about.–Grok