Pace Press

Issue date: 11/8/06 Section: Features

Media Credit: Steve Duncan

Media Credit: Joe Ahearn

"New Yorkers go all over the world, but the city has a way of swallowing their homecomings," Jeff Stark, creator of the series "Where Have You Been?" said. "Orbit the earth and your friends will ask you if you missed the pizza."

Jeff Stark does indeed orbit, not the world, persay, but in the upper tiers of New York's alpha-hipsters. He plays a significant role in the burgeoning "New Dork City" scene, as dubbed by TimeOut New York, and runs a weekly email newsletter called NonsenseNYC to alert people of DIY events. The e-mails are read by, I can only imagine, thousands of New Yorkers every week who rely on Stark to keep the community connected.

Along with his upkeep of the NonsenseNYC newsletter, Stark has started the series "Where Have You Been?" Structured in interview form, Stark leads his three guests through tales of the most exciting parts of some of their recent travels. Stark recently embarked upon his own adventure over the summer during which he managed to raft down the Mississippi river with a large group of enthusiasts on a gigantic, homemade raft. Like some kind of present-day Huckleberry Finn, I suppose he took his laptop with him, because the Nonsense emails kept being sent out through his entire trip.

All three of the guests in the "Where Have You Been?" show I attended were photographers, but I don't think it was supposed to be a theme. The show took place in The Blue Stocking Bookstore, a sort of anarcho-lesbian activist spot still surviving in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The room was set up with a digital projector and screen for slides and chairs lined up as if it were a talk show. When I ordered a cup of coffee to sip, the waitress asked, "Would you like soy milk or cow juice in that coffee?" Yeah, it's that kind of place.

The first interviewee, Tod Seelie, was working on long-exposure photos in a ghetto in San Paulo, Brazil when he was kidnapped. Seelie happened to be lugging around a large, analog camera, which was not the brightest of ideas. The second interviewee was Ida Benedetto, who had traveled to Darjeeling, India to photograph an organic tea collective. Upon arrival, she realized what they really wanted was to see her photographs from a previous trip to a Guatemalan coffee farmer's collective. Her trip evolved into something completely different than she had expected.

Stark saved the best adventurer for last. Steve Duncan, a self-described "urban explorer," briefly told us about his adventures throughout New York, where he photographed extensive networks of unused subway tunnels beneath the city. If that wasn't impressive enough, Duncan delved into his recent trip to Minneapolis where he explored the city's unique and complicated underground infrastructure. Apparently, Minneapolis is one of the only cities in America built upon sandstone, which makes digging almost effortless.

Thanks to the combined efforts of amateur "archeologists" throughout the city, Duncan was able to crawl his way through extensive caverns and catacombs still intact beneath the city, some dating back hundreds of years which still held hidden bottles of alcohol from prohibition. The trip culminated with Duncan and his guides spending a few days in an underground cavern. They slowly filled the cave with over a thousand tea lights so Duncan could photograph the interior with the soft glow of flame. While he was the most modest photographer of the group, Duncan's photographs were breathtaking. Halfway through his story, the lights were dimmed and his photos transcended the typical projector hindrances that had plagued the earlier speakers.

There's something haunting about seeing proof of places that don't seem to exist in the same reality as our own. Sitting in the dark of The Blue Stocking, with my steaming cup of caffeine and cow juice, I was in awe of these people who were so far out of a box I hadn't even noticed I was in. To those of you with cameras, start exploring the unknown; the adventure is in finding what you didn't know you were looking for. And for the rest of you, keep an eye on NonsenseNYC.com. Stark will be doing another one of these soon, and I can only imagine them getting better.

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