photographed in Beijing, China on September 1, 2007

Summoning her courage, she motioned to Tyler and led them inside. It took a few moments for their eyes to adjust to the relative darkness of the interior. They stood in a cavernous temple, the heights of which were lost in shadows. Three enormous bronze buddhas, representing the past, the present, and the future, sat enthroned upon their long altar, the front of which was decorated with elaborate and colorful filigreed panels representing the auspicious symbols of the religion. Concrete pillars rose up to the ceiling, decorated with bright red banners adorned with black calligraphy. Other banners hung from the ceiling, ending in rich tassels of red silk. A forest of incense sticks burned inside wide stone urns of sand. Baskets of fruit offerings sat between banks of candles, and it was all Allison could do, after having stolen a bicycle from a peasant and honey from a farmer, not to steal fruit from the gods.

A group of monks in saffron robes stood chanting at the far end of the altar, their resonant chorus echoing from the high stone walls. One of the monks beat on a deep drum that reverberated like thunder through the temple. Another rang a brass gong, while yet another sounded chimes. Their voices rose and fell in unison in a steady, rhythmic mantra of worship, their shaved heads bowed over hands folded in prayer. Seemingly oblivious to the three visitors who stood dripping in the entryway, the monks never faltered in their mesmerizing incantation.

Excerpted from China Run by David Ball. Published by Simon & Schuster, New York, 2002.

photographed in Congers, New York on September 11, 2010

There have been all sorts of mechanical pickers advertised, but none has ever become popular. They are of two kinds. The first kind, intended to pick a single apple at a time out of the higher branches, consists of some sort of pocket hung on the end of a long pole. These contrivances are too slow and cumbersome for any commercial work. The second style presents some modification of the old practice of shaking apples off trees. It furnishes some kind a of a spread held under the branches upon which the apples are shaken down. While the method is cheap enough to make it commercially available, it is too rough for the exacting demands of present-day business. By all means the best way of putting up commercial apples is to pick by hand from the trees.

There is something of a knack in picking apples, but unfortunately expert apple pickers are not often to be hired. The fruit-grower is usually obliged to put up with ordinary day labor and to make up in the carefulness of his own supervision the lack of experience on the part of the pickers. Apple pickers usually get the prevailing day wages; that is, from $1 to $1.75 a day.

Excerpted from The American Apple Orchard: A Sketch of the Practice of Apple Growing in North America at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century by F. A. Waugh. Published by Orange Judd Company, New York, 1912.

photographed in Brattleboro, Vermont on May 31, 2010

This has been the case, and where a few years ago the Box elder Bug was an unknown insect it is now found in large and increasing numbers. Still this great increase would not be noticed, or only be a few more observing persons, if this insect did not possess the peculiar habit of crowding together late in autumn, preliminary to searching for suitable quarters to hibernate. As soon as the foliage of the box elder becomes dry and discolored, or, in other words, as soon as the leaves of the tree no longer offer liquid sap to the insects, these desert such useless sources of food, and descend to the limbs and trunks of the trees. Here they gather in large numbers, perhaps to hold indignation meetings about the shortness of summer and food supplies! At all events they crowd together, old and young, as if waiting for better times. Whenever the sun shines and warms one side of the trunk, or the sidewalk below the tree, there these bugs are sure to congregate. Later, and when the leaves commence to drop, all bugs have reached their full size, and are winged. But they do not use their wings, and are very sensible not to do so, because they assuredly would be blown about the adjoining prairies and would perish. They now search for winter quarters. If the sidewalk under the box elder trees, their old homes, should be a wooden one, most of the bugs will find shelter under it. If no such shelters are found, however, the insects enter barns and stables, and are not slow to enter even houses, much to the disgust of the ladies of the household. The bugs are decidedly stupid, at least they cannot be scared away, but have to be forcibly ejected. This habit of crowding into dwellings has been the cause of many complaints.

Excerpted from Sixth Annual Report of the Entomologist of the State Experiment Station of the University of Minnesota to the Governor for the Year 1900 by Otto Lugger. Published by McGill-Warner Co., St. Paul, Minnesota, 1900.

photographed in Yankee Stadium, the Bronx, New York on May 4, 2010

Baseball remains in trouble with the general public, though, despite the ticket prices people pay and the flocks who keep showing up to pay them. An ESPN poll revealed that among kids, the next generation of fans, football is number one, basketball is number two, and baseball is number three in popularity, with only 18 percent expressing the opinion that the national pastime is their favorite game. With owners looking to max revenues now instead of build for the long term, they started nationally telecast playoff games, their most critical television product, at increasingly late hours, alienating the fans of the future who couldn’t stay up to watch the conclusions, let alone the fans of the past and present who didn’t want to stay up, either. Will maxing out ad revenues now backfire in later in eroded fan support? Probably, if it hasn’t already. Will it erode sponsor support, pegged at as much as $9 million per team per year? Maybe, if the sport no longer serves as the conduit for the corporation to reach the consumer …

So, increasingly, the corporation becomes and maintains itself as the conduit for the fan to get to the game and get closer to the game, however that may be.

Excerpted from Sports Marketing by Howard Schlossberg. Published by Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts, 1996.

photographed at the Tsukiji Fish Market, Tokyo, Japan on September 4, 2007

Out to the freezing banks of the Sumida River he led us, to see the rows of tuna laid out for the morning auctions. Blanketing in the thick cocoons of frost, solidly frozen tuna the size of tree trunks clinked like brittle chimes as prospective buyers picked out slivers of tail meat for inspection. Crowds of buyers and auctioneers warmed their hands at fires stoked with the broken wooden crates lying about. We watched auctions go by in a split second as Watanabe tried to explain to us the hand signals and staccato chants that indicated bids. He led us through warrens of stalls where he or his chef apprentice would stop for a moment to purchase a kilogram of shrimp, or a large cut of tuna, or several legs of octopus, a tray or two of sea urchin roe, and then thrust the purchase into a rectangular wooden basked slung over the junior apprentice’s shoulder. If money changed hands, I didn’t see it. In the fast conversations back and forth I couldn’t catch any discussions of prices. Watanabe and his crew knew exactly where they were going, and what they wanted to buy when they got there. Though they paused along the way to examine products at many stalls scattered around the marketplace, to my inexperienced eyes the ikura (salmon roe) they didn’t purchase where they bought the kamaboko (fish pâté) looked identical to the salmon roe they did buy at the stall where they ignored the pâté.

Excerpted from Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World by Theodore C. Bestor. Published by University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004.

photographed in Hillsboro, Ohio on March 20, 2008

Location of the Hillsboro Cemetery is in Highland County, State Rt 138 South West, Hillsboro, Ohio 45133. Hillsboro Cemetery was created on May 30, 1862 as recorded in Original Book 30, page 349, Highland County Deed Records, the Hillsboro Cemetery Association of the Town Hillsborough purchased from Allen TRIMBLE and wife RACHEL 31 acres 1 quarter and 25 poles of land for a cemetery. On July 22, 1862, in the Original Book 30, page 351, the Association sold to Lafayette Lodge No. 25 of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows of Hillsboro 4 acres. 1 rod and 15 poles “to hold and use the above described premises for burial purposes exclusively”.

Excerpted from ‘Hillsboro Cemetery‘ on RootsWeb. Last updated November 11, 2004.

photographed in Providence, Rhode Island on February 20, 2010

We have never said—until the skyscraper—“We want such and such a building because it is suited to our lives , the way we work, the way we play, the way we live—simple, strong, and fairly intelligent lives.” At least, if it has been said before the last few years, it was in a whisper, and the idea was never realized. When a man of wealth among us has desired a home, he has not asked his architect to study the land upon which he was to build, and the stone he could quarry from the land, and the wood he could find in the forest, and the lay of the landscape, and the manner of life of the man who wanted the home. A check was written and the architect started fro Europe, or the Orient, or in any futile direction, and then he returned and imitated in wrong materials the most inappropriate place he had seen and the man lived in the place and was proud and uncomfortable. Thus our homes in general average about as national and personal an expression of our wants as a log cabin on the Boulevard des Italiens or an Indian tepee on the Nile.

But when difficulties arose with our housing problem in one long, narrow tape-measure of a city, and we found ourselves with twice as much business as space, it became impossible to sit around and wonder what Ptolemy would have done in the building line under the circumstances, or even to rely upon the architectural impulses of Italian nobles or the needs of monkish communities in the Middle Ages.

Circumstances put an iron hand upon counterfeit architecture for commercial purposes in New York, and forced us to build something that we, as a nation, needed, that was adapted to our own way of living and working, that in fact possessed national characteristics. The manifestation of this first honest building impulse in America was the skyscraper, maligned, wronged, insulted from the start, and yet up to the present time the finest architectural expression in this country because of the completeness of its adaptation to need. And it is the skyscraper that has changed the outline of New York City, that has revolutionized the quality of it, and that has created the first suggestion of beauty the city had ever laid claim to.

Excerpted from ‘How New York has Redeemed Herself from Ugliness—An Artist’s Revelation of the Beauty of the Skyscraper’ by Giles Edgerton. Originally appearing in The Craftsman, an Illustrated Monthly Magazine in the Interest of Better Art, Better Work, and a Better and More Reasonable Way of Living, volume 11. Published by Gustav Stickley, New York, 1907.

photographed in Tokyo, Japan on September 4, 2007

If you don’t like “street photographer,” how do you respond to that other tiresome phrase, “snapshot aesthetic”?

I knew that was coming. That’s another stupidity. The people who use the term don’t even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they’re talking about snapshots they’re talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs. Everybody’s fifteen feet away and smiling. The sun is over the viewer’s shoulder. That’s when the picture is taken, always. It’s one of the most carefully made photographs that ever happened. People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

That’s an interesting point, particularly coming from someone who takes — or rather, composes and then snaps — lightning-fast shots.

I’ll say this, I’m pretty fast with a camera when I have to be. However, I think it’s irrelevant. I mean, what if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can’t prove otherwise. You don’t know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really. But every photograph could be set up. If one could imagine it, one could set it up. The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs.

From Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography by Barbaralee Diamonstein. Published by Rizoli, New York, 1981.