A CITY IN MOTION // NEW YORK CITY. DRAFTED 12/7/15. PUBLISHED 9/11/20.
this post was originally written in December 2015, and is one of 3 drafts that live in the blog queue. A lot has changed since then
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Currently I’m sitting on a plane somewhere above Indianapolis, and as I’m listening to some sort of strange noise coming from the phone of the gentleman sitting next to me I all of a sudden got the urge to sum up my trip to the greatest city on earth.
NEW YORK CITY.
It’s been awhile since I’ve been back to the city that never sleeps. My grandmother’s 90th birthday was the last occasion that drug me out to the city that makes you feel brand new, and this time the occasion was Thanksgiving.
I hadn’t spent a holiday at my grandmothers house since 2002 (which was Christmas). That was a Christmas I’ll never forget, a couple of the things I remember the most about that trip are getting a Hummer H2 RC car that I was madly in love with and visiting the Toys ‘R’ Us in Times square that was so big it had a ferris wheel inside of it. The reason I bring up the Toys ‘R’ Us is because on this last trip back to the Big Apple I caught word that they are closing that store for good and my heart nearly fell into my stomach. How in the world could one of the largest toy stores in the country in one of the busiest cities in the nation close? It blows my mind but it also opens my eyes to the realization that the internet age is coming on a lot stronger than I had realized. Another factor that led to the realization of the internet age takeover was that in the 5 days I spent in my grandmothers house (which does not have wifi) I hadn’t gotten hardly ANY of my work done.
My reasoning was that I had no internet connection.
Which really doesn’t make sense if you think about it because I don’t really need the internet to work on photos. But what I DO need the internet for is streaming music, posting to social media, keeping up with e-mails, and all of the other unnecessary distractions that occur during my regular work hours.
Anyway, none of that really has hardly anything to do with what I really wanted to write about, those are just some on the plane thoughts for you, haha!
I love New York City so much. Which is a little strange because I can remember back in 2002 when I was being guided through the sea of humans in Manhattan by my mother who grew up there that I really didn’t like what was happening. I was also 12 years old…but let me tell you all of the things that 12 year old travis was thinking while drowning in a sea of humans in New York City.
-There’s way too many people here
-I don’t like this
-I can’t wait to play with this RC car
-Am I going to get pick pocketed?
-What did I do with that fireball YoYo that my dad got me? I haven’t seen it in months.
Today my thoughts have changed 100% As I walked through the city in 2015 my thoughts were something along the lines of:
-OMG I love that building.
-Oh dope! an old KAWS tag!
-Damn I wanna live here.
-That would be a dope spot for a photoshoot
-Which train do I need to take? theres 30 of them.
-Damn I wanna live here.
DAMN I WANNA LIVE HERE!!
As I wandered through that wonderful place, I couldnt help but notice that no matter where I looked there was this overwhelming sense of motion. Whether it was from the busy New Yorkers speed walking across the intersection, or the slew of cabs dodging other cars to get someone who’s in a rush where they needed to be. Everything was always moving. Fast. And I fuckin’ loved it.
As I stood still in the middle of a sidewalk flooded with busy people, tourists, bums, and garbage…I realized that I wanted to try and capture the motion of the city. From cars in traffic, to speeding through busy intersections, to the high amount of foot traffic, to the rumble of the subway. I fell in love with all of it. And I wanted to try and capture it.
Most of these shots are from a point and shoot, but there was one day where I lugged the other camera around the city and did my best to capture as much motion as possible. I do wish that I would have taken quite a bit more photographs...but I think I was overwhelmed with the speed and excitement of the city that I really didn't want to take my eyes off of anything long enough to capture it with anything other than my eyes.
I also made sure to get over to the Freedom Tower and World Trade Center Memorial. I've done a lot of research about the memorial fountains and knew almost to a tee what everything in the surrounding area looking like...but as soon as I rounded the corner and was standing in the middle of everything it all became real. I've been wanting to see this site for quite some time now, and I still can't figure out the right words to describe it.
As I was standing at the base of where Tower 1 stood-I was replaying images from 2001 when I was watching the events unfold whole sitting in my 5th grade classroom. At one point it became clear to me that I was standing and walking around a site where people were jumping and falling hundreds of feet to their ends. I can't really find words to describe that experience either.
UPDATED 9/11/2020: this post didn’t get finished because thinking about 9/11/01 put me into downward spiral at a very vulnerable time in my life. As I revisit this 5 years later it’s become extremely apparent to me that a lot of things were happening in 2015 that I was not equipped to handle properly.
2 years after the death of my father I had become an intensely toxic human being, projecting most of my discomforts onto anything/anyone in my path. This resulted in lashing out at my job and yelling at my boss and co-workers, a very dysfunctional relationship, treating my friends poorly, and burning more bridges than I was building.
I had become a version of myself that I absolutely hated, who I still hate, and who I’m embarrassed to have been. That version of me no longer exists thanks to a large amount of inner reflection and confrontation.
I did what needed to be done. I faced myself- I mean really faced myself. I was ugly, angry, and hurt. But it became more clear that all of that mess was just a shell protecting what I consider to be the actual me.
There’s something really special that happens when we confront our toxic selves. We reveal the deepest, most unimaginable character traits and fight them head on. It gets really ugly. It hurts a lot, and it often feels like the toxicity is stronger. I can confidently say that for the majority of my life the toxicity was stronger, and it felt like the only way to truly defeat it was to no longer be alive.
Evolution is a wonderful thing, but it isn’t always wonderful looking. The periods of me shedding toxicity were weird as fuck. The more I peeled the more I revealed. Each evolution brought on a new bundle of challenges. I became more and more unpredictable. At one point I had a few friends held hostage to a brilliant plan of how I was a literal living advertisement and had cracked the code on becoming a legend in the industry. It’s pretty strange to be on the receiving end of “I’m worried about you” especially when you’re so deep in these ideas that you’ve become the characters of your own projects. Like I said, evolution isn’t wonderful looking.
I could go more in depth about the evolution of me as a human, but I think its more important to note that today I’m in the best mental health of my entire life. I’m finally realizing who I actually am as a human. I recently had an opportunity to face my current self, for the first time in my life I really liked who I saw. I’m really happy to be here, and if I had chosen to believe what I considered to be the “only option” to defeat my former self; I wouldn’t be.
I’ve been extremely fascinated with death for awhile now, and am looking forward to it. But my belief system doesn’t tolerate taking my own life- instead it promotes the completion of my mission so I can be rewarded with death, but that’s a discussion for another time.
If you’re still reading (I hope you’re not because I’ve never told anyone this in my entire life) thanks. You were probably apart of the effort to keep me here. It worked.
Originally I came to the post because I wanted to pull the image of the freedom tower in New York City, but I’m really glad that I spent a few minutes re-living that era because it’s very important for me as a human to be able to track the progress of outgrowing my former selves.
Check on your people. Check on yourself. Stick around. I’m glad I did.
<3 travis