SoHo artist proximity—neighbors borrowing cameras—enabled the making of canonical art

Evidence

A bit more than a year earlier, Michael Snow, then living on Chambers Street, walked a few blocks up to his studio, a second-floor loft on the downtown side of Canal Street adjacent to Pearl Paint, a six-story jerry-built art supply store that had been around since the Great Depression. Using a tripod, Snow planted a 16mm camera, borrowed from his neighbor Ken Jacobs, at one end of the loft; he then spent two weeks inching the zoom lens forward until it framed a photograph of the sea tacked between two of the four outsized windows framing SoHo’s southern border. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1118

Categorization

• XREF: Perfect concrete instance of the reader’s ‘physical proximity’ condition: a borrowed camera from a neighbor two blocks away produced a landmark film. Test case for cultural-stagnation claims about absent density/collegiality.
• SHARE: Worth sending to any film friend — Wavelength was shot on a camera borrowed from Ken Jacobs, with conditions hinging on neighbor proximity in SoHo.