Fantasy in Newark, New Jersey

Fantasy in Newark, New Jersey
Originally uploaded by randubnick.

This view of the Newark skyline began as the background of a photo I took in Newark with Mel when he taught at Rutgers. Once we moved up to Boston, Mel rented an apartment in Newark where he stayed during the week, and I used to like to visit when he was there over the weekend. Mel lived in Newark when he was a teenager; for me, the city was an acquired taste. At first, I just saw it as a convenient launching point for getting to New York City (which it certainly is). But then I began to really look at the 1940s buildings, the skyline, Ferry Street with its Brazilian and Portuguese culture, and I began to appreciate Newark for its own sake. I was thinking about this today because we are all waiting for the Sopranos to air tonight, and I became a fan of the show the first time I saw the photography of New Jersey in the opening scenes. So I decided that my photo of Newark was worth rescuing. I opened the image in Painter IX and used digital chalk to even out the color of the sky, and then sharpened the edges of some of the buildings, picking up colors that were already there in the original photograph. So I call this a fantasy in Newark, New Jersey, not because of the Sopranos (another New Jersey fantasy), but because the image has been digitally edited.