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  • Chrysler Building during the day.
    fct4383-841_Chrysler 0002 1 of Serie...jpg
  • Chrysler Building during the day.
    Chrysler 0002 1 of Series.jpg
  • Chrysler Building, the Guardian
    Chrysler 0008.jpg
  • Chrysler Building, the Guardian
    fct4383-843_Chrysler 0005 4 of Serie...jpg
  • Chrysler Building, the Guardian
    Chrysler 0005 4 of Series.jpg
  • Chrysler Building, the Guardian.  Dusk on New York City.
    Chrysler 0004 3 of Series.jpg
  • Chrysler Building, the Guardian
    fct4383-842_Chrysler 0003 2 of Serie...jpg
  • Chrysler Building, the Guardian
    Chrysler 0003 2 of Series.jpg
  • Photography is usually one of the professions where, if you do a bad job nobody dies but when I photographed the Chrysler Building there was every chance that if we messed up – statistically someone was going to get hurt.  We fabricated a scaffold with adjustable platforms to mount four motorized Hasselblad cameras and hang it over the edge of the Chrysler Building to get this viewpoint. One of my assistants, a bit of an electronics buff wired all the cameras to a single switching box so I could fire them all with one button. It so happened that the previous tenants had vacated the week before so we had the whole wing of the floor to ourselves.  We strung climbing rope through the windows and around the building as a main lifeline and clipped ourselves onto the line with harnesses.  The whole heavy contraption was lowered and raised about thirty times over rush hour pedestrian traffic some 57 stories above Lexington Avenue as we changed film backs and adjusted exposures and made slight adjustments in camera angles.  Even though we were all roped and harnessed in, if anything fell, say a film back or film slide and hit someone it would have been a disaster.<br />
We photographed the building over several days during a couple of sunsets and sunrises, even at different times of year but the best shot was taken the first day.  It was one of those miraculously rare clear days when the pollution was blown out to sea leaving metropolis looking like it just got out of the bath.  I used Tungsten film to accentuate the blues of magic hour when two divergent spectrums of light, blues and reds, coverag
    Chrysler 0001 Guardian.jpg
  • New York Chrysler building in the evening with Grand Central Station.
    fct4383-846_Chrysler 0010.jpg
  • New York Chrysler building in the evening with Grand Central Station.
    Chrysler 0010.jpg
  • Chrysler Building, the Guardian
    Chrysler 0007.jpg
  • Chrysler Building, the Guardian
    fct4383-844_Chrysler 0007.jpg
  • Setting up Chrysler Building photograph called The Guardian.
    Chrysler 0020 set up 1.jpg
  • Chrysler Building with Grand Central Station.
    fct4383-845_Chrysler 0009 Grand Cent...jpg
  • Chrysler Building with Grand Central Station.
    Chrysler 0009 Grand Central.jpg
  • There are images that come into my head sometimes and I’m not sure where they come from.  Dreams have always been a rich resource for me and poems too and this shot came through both channels.  One of my assistants in New York was Roy Michaels, a former rock star of sorts whose band, Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys, was produced by Jimi Hendrix.  He used to play concerts with Hendrix, several hundred thousand people screaming fans and now he was painting my studio ceiling - and not in the Michael Angelo sense -  we're talking flat white Sears’ house paint.  A decade plus later Roy was happy with his life, content to live without crowds and the rock star life. He kept a little sailboat in San Francisco Bay called Invictus where he could get away from it all.  I had never heard the poem Invictus and Roy recited it to me as he painted my ceiling.  I had a dream that night and started making this little set in the corner of my loft with seagulls soon after.  These were the days before PhotoShop.  The guy in this photo, another assistant is actually hanging there suspended with seagulls tied to his wrists – he wasn’t dropped in later by a computer.  I guess this set looked pretty strange even to the artists in the building who would pass by my loft and ask what I was doing.   Some of these same artists would paint some pretty strange imagery while working through various neuroses but it’s one thing to paint a fantasy, its quite another to actually build it.
    Deja Blue.jpg
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Louie Psihoyos Photography

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