New York City is like the rainforest, dense with competing and coexisting lifeforms. When I moved here in the 1980’s, the most striking aspect of the city was the level of anarchy and disorder that prevailed, both in the people and in the physical environment. It was frightening but also exciting to me. It said anything goes here, anything is possible.
Since that time, the city has been subjected to a concerted effort to bring it in line and shine it up for the benefit of the tourists and the free-spending wealthy. But there’s still quite a bit of disorder remaining. Every city is marked by decay and destructive forces, but the high density cities also show a sort of wild snarl that comes of so many, pressed so tight, trying to make their marks, trying to self-express or sell in an overcrowded market.
These images dazzle the visual cortex with their mad clutter. A similar visual energy can be seen in another standard New York sight, the small overstuffed store.
People make ramshackle barricades, with no concern for aesthetics. Indeed, perhaps the mess says “Keep away.”
Even engineered structures can take on this forbidding rat’s nest quality. Here’s an underpass beneath elevated subway tracks in Queens. The combination of the mustard yellow signal light housings with the pale pink ironwork is not a color scheme anyone is likely to have chosen consciously.
Here’s a jumbled pile of trash.
And here’s a bike rack where, I think, the wheels have been removed from the bikes to facilitate locking everything up for safekeeping, resulting in a more structured but still overly busy visual mess.
This is an electronics store display pushing Playstations and Palm Pilots for Christmas.
Even clothing displays can create optical turmoil.
A kind of purely visual pandemonium can result from the conjunction of overly busy store window displays with reflections in the glass. Maybe people don’t notice this effect because they visually separate things that are seen on different depth planes, but the camera compresses them into two dimensions.
This kind of visual excess has an energizing effect on me, like wild music that’s dissonant yet exuberant.