jdx, a community contributor to The Local East Village, discusses working the streets with a camera.

“Most of these images are captured on the streets of the East Village with a mobile, edited in-device and uploaded. A lot of their inspiration is sourced from writing and literary studies, album covers and underground novels, beat poetry and outsider art. I try not to get hit by cars.”

Outpost. 13 August, 11:31 a.m.

“The East Village. Alphabet City. Loisaida. Home. Taken at the corner of East Third Street and Avenue A this image recollects Skylab orbital photographs from the 1970’s. Streetlights and traffic signals like satellite antennas, Spazmat’s Skullphone art, overcast sky disorients the directional senses. On the sidewalk, I was lying on my back.”

Transient. 6 September, 11:36 p.m.

“A transient on St. Marks Place at the end of summer 2010. The image was inspired by a line from Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem Howl, ‘who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in paradise alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares…’ “

154 East Second Street. 23 September, 9:04 a.m.

“Graffiti. The urban meme. Miles of glyphs twisting across the East
Village — tags, street art, stickers, obscenities, prayers, love, hate, warning
signs — converging on an East Second Street doorway in Alphabet City.”

The Gates. 16 November, 1:07 p.m.

“Downtown Auto & Tire. At the fading intersection of the Bowery and Great Jones Street. Faces by street artist WK Interact. Auto by Mercedes. Postcard from the future. Jean-Michael Basquiat died across the street.”

Sunshine. 6 December, 3:17 p.m.

“The Sunshine Theater is the best art-house cinema in New York City to lose yourself in film. This shot, taken behind the marquee, frames the low perimeter of the East Village at Houston Street on a deserted Monday. It was just beginning to rain.”

Nuclear Winter. 26 December, 10:50 p.m.

“Snowpocalypse. Winds howling down East Fourth Street and I’m up against the Ageloff Towers watching jets of snow whip past me at 50 miles per hour. I step into the blizzard long enough to get the shot and knocked on my face. “

Goodbye Blue Sky. 31 December, 2:40 p.m.

“End of an anxious decade. The birds had been orbiting First Avenue for hours on rotation with the wind, circling and landing on the corner of East Fourth Street. The image’s title is a Pink Floyd song from ‘The Wall’ about fear and upheaval — birds like drones blanketing the sky, waiting.”

First Houses. 11 February, 2:57 p.m.

“First Houses were, literally, the first public housing units constructed in the United States. In 1974 they were designated a National Historical Landmark which asserts that they cannot be torn down, gutted, re-purposed, incorporated, co-opted or gentrified. And in a neighborhood that is progressively morphing to costly glass and sheetrock, someday these untouchable buildings might be the only trace of an East Village that has any sense of its own history.”

jdx is a community contributor to The Local East Village. His work can be viewed on his blog.