Timing

I finally got to visit the newly constructed and not-quite-finished New York Times building over the weekend, accompanied by the best tour guide possible - my mom. I'm enormously proud of my mother, a tiny little Asian woman who is so unpreposessing until you find out that she regularly (but humbly) snaps the whip over dozens of powersuit-clad IT peons. And she likes it.

Walking through the front door, I thought we had the address wrong. This can't be the Times! Perhaps the MoMA? You almost want to pay an entrance fee. It's beautiful, spacious, minimal, with such bold colors your instinct is to wonder when they'll go out of style. They are not, at least not yet, and you walk through the glass and wood cathedral to the elevators.

The modern twist is played on all levels. Golden hallways beside snow-white walls. Eye-watering crimson behind plain silver cabinets. Everything is clean, square, and efficient. Revolutionary and perfectly modern. In some cases the playful furniture may not actually be furniture. But is it art?


The most striking thing to me was, of course, the photographs that line the walls. If not represented in top-of-the-line LCD screens, historic shots are reprinted and hung along the center wall space of the offices. The extensive history of this company (of which I grew up taking for granted) displays such examples of world-class photojournalism right next to their bathrooms and water fountains. Only now, almost 3 decades later, I come to appreciate them. Eventually my family was gone, leaving me staring at a grainy black and white print, thinking about the decade that it was taken - usually long before my birth but sometimes soon after it. This was a different kind of Photographer's Zone, the kind contemplating the will of steel of the journalist behind that lens, living on fear and persistence and against all odds to take that one shot, capturing the raw emotion that made it worthy of being reprinted and framed in a building in 2007. Is that Marilyn Monroe? Why yes, yes it is. And there she stands, her satin-wrapped curves standing in the spotlight ten feet from a WWII fighter jet pilot looking down on the Statue of Liberty.

The presence of these images in their original, intended forms, separated from me by a single pane of glass -- not in a museum where people travel to come and see and pay for the honor, but hung on a wall largely unnoticed and unappreciated by the people who sit within feet of them 5 days a week -- was more moving and meaningful to me than anyone will ever be able to understand.

Anyway, I didn't capture things very well that day. Don't get me wrong: I think I did all right for myself, and it was for fun... but I got nothin' on Annie Leibovitz.