Wow, what a day yesterday and last night. I’ll start off with yesterday during the day.
There are a lot of hot spots in New York City. The police call them hot spots – a lot of illegal activity, a lot of crime or whatever. I have my own special hot spots – a little bit of crime, a little bit of tourist. But there’s a corner I work on. I don’t want to mention the corner but I’ll tell you what’s going on there.
There’s a purse – illegal – store house that’s up on the third floor. The Africans all surrounding the block bring the people upstairs and they buy their purses. It’s illegal but it’s not like something crazy. So, there are a lot of tourists there, nervous because they’re going upstairs to a room with Africans.
Then two doors down from there is a Korean massage parlor with happy ending. So you have all these nice looking Korean girls going in and out to work – night shift, day shift and then you have these guys who go there who want to sneak in without being noticed.
You got me outside there, flashing the camera doing my thing, Portraits of New York.
The Africans are nervous, the tourists are nervous and the massage parlor customers and workers are nervous.
So I got the whole place in a nervous situation.
In fact, last week, the police set up a sting operation there. Of course everyone on that block knows what they’re doing. I don’t understand why they’re doing it but the undercover cop told me to put my camera away because I’m disrupting the sting operation and I thought that was very funny.
So when the undercover police came up to me and talked to me, some of the Africans have seen them talking to me so they thought I was part of that. But I explained to them for the last three or four weeks that I’m not. So I had to do the whole explanation again.
It’s very funny, when someone asked me what I’m doing. I have this big press pass and I tell them that I’m undercover. I don’t say police undercover. I just say undercover, which I’m a photographer undercover and that’s a big joke.
But yesterday was great photographs, it was just a good day.
I want to talk about last night but I want to sign off right now because I have to do something and I want to say happy birthday to my son.