Latest posts
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How to Photograph a Town With Nothing to Point At
The only traffic light on the main street was blinking yellow at eleven in the morning, and a man was reading a newspaper in a parked truck with the door hanging open. Thorne Clark, a New York photographer, had already walked the block twice. There was no courthouse worth the trip, no famous bridge, and…
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Read About the Place Before You Photograph It
You can usually tell, looking at somebody’s photographs of a historic building, whether they learned anything about it before walking in. The unread version circles the outside, finds the front door, and settles on the best angle for the roofline. It is competent and it is hollow. Thorne Clark of New York reads before he…
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What the Mirrorless Camera Actually Changed
The first thing Thorne Clark of New York changed on his mirrorless camera was the strap, because the one in the box spelled the brand across his chest in white letters. That is a small thing and also most of the story. A camera announces you before you have taken anything, and the phone he…
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Every Block Is an Argument About Time
Stand on almost any block in the city and look up past the ground floor. You will find at least three eras stacked against each other, usually awkwardly, occasionally well, and almost never by anyone’s plan. Thorne Clark, a New York photographer, spends most of his walking time reading exactly that. The stack is the…
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The Overlook Is the Worst Part of the Foliage Trip
The famous overlooks are the least useful places to stand in the Hudson Valley in October. Thorne Clark of New York has stood at a few of them, shoulder to shoulder with people holding phones out over a railing, and driven home with nothing worth keeping. The view is genuinely good. The photograph of it…
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The Map Is the Problem
He was standing on a corner with maybe fifteen minutes of usable light left and no clear idea where to go next. The sensible move was back toward the avenue, where the buildings ran taller and the light would hold longer. Thorne Clark, a New York photographer, went the other way instead, downhill into a…
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The Walkaround Trained the Eye, Then Photography Spent It
A rust stain runs down a limestone windowsill on a side street, roughly the width of a pencil, ending in a faint orange fan on the stone below. Thorne Clark of New York noticed the stain a good ten seconds before he noticed the building it belonged to. That order of operations is not natural.…
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The Hour Beats the Address Every Time
Brooklyn Heights is not a remarkable place to photograph. It is a well-kept neighborhood with good bones and a famous view, and by two in the afternoon it photographs like a real estate listing. Thorne Clark of New York has walked those blocks often enough to say so without hedging. What changes the neighborhood is…