Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Hi! Thanks for visiting. I'm an American photographer living in Buenos Aires. These are photos from the blog I kept on my site from 2003 to 2009. I now have redesigned the home page to just show a portfolio of my current work. I also blog at BuenosAiresPhotographer.com where I post my baires snapshots. |
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Houston Village Farms, Houston & Mulberry. My corner store. SkyScraperCity.com has some fantastic forums where people have posted pictures of skylines around the world. All the new interesting construction is taking place in the developing world: |
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Bleecker, on the 6 downtown platform.
Subway Maps: Edward Tufte on Mr. Beck's London Underground map. NYC's Subway drawn in the style of the London Underground. With local trains, the Bergen Light Rail and even the Newark Subway [!]. It's unfortunate the MTA so deliberately pretends that New Jersey doesn't exist. NYC Subway Map archive. From the 30s to the present. Massimo Vignelli's 1972 subway map. I just bought one of these on eBay and framed it on my wall. The map is aggressively abstract. It takes some inspiration from Mr. Beck's map but also has a lot of 70s grooviness to it. The geographic distortions are pretty extreme. Central Park is Square. Lower Manhattan takes up about half the map. But it looks cool. Tokyo, Paris, London, and many other cities posted to a discussion forum on SkyscraperCity.com. |
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| These glass skyscrapers around Manhattan will, on sunny winter days, relfect this intense yet diffuse sunlight in odd directions. I work in midtown and I'm often struck by the cinematic quality of pedestrians lit by this bright, oddly angled light, like the artificial lighting in photographs by Philip Lorca-diCorcia. Walking across Madison Square the other sunday I was in the middle of just such a swath of reflected light and had a friend snap the photo. |
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| A local version of the flatiron. Buenos Aires is nothing but 8-12 story concrete apartment buildings constructed on narrow plots laid out by the Spaniards in Colonial times. Individual blocks are an architectural jumble of different styles as old houses were gradually town down and replaced with apartment flats. Buenos Aires is a city where it seems the words 'site consolidation' have rarely, if ever, crossed a real estate developers lips. |
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| Each building is responsible for the sidewalk in front of their building, putting down their own unique tile, of which the picture above is one common example. Sometimes they'll come loose and dirty water will splash up, as if in some video game. |
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Plaza San Martin.
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| It was late spring in Buenos Aires. It was sunny and in the low 80s most of the days I was there. The Jacaranda trees were blooming, a little past their prime. I think I prefer Buenos Aires in the gray winter. It fits better with my image of the city as a melancholy place. |
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| I went back to Buenos Aires over thanksgiving. This view is of downtown, which is a jumble of small, concrete buildings ranging from 6-20 stories. |
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This photo is from inside the Subte on Line A.
It's the oldest subway line in South American,
having opened in 1913. The cars currently in use
date from the 1920s and are the world's oldest
still in used. The doors have small leather latches
that you pull to open when the train arrives in the
station. The cars bodies are made of wood and they
rock and bed with the bumps along the tracks. The
incandescent lights blink on and off when the train
switches tracks the car and briefly loses electricity.
Some of my Porteño friends think it's an embarrassing
anachronism.
En el Subte, is a Spanish blog about experiences on the Buenos Aires subway. You can also see my gallery of Buenos Aires photos which I took back when I lived there in '99 and 2000. |
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| Here's another view of the World Trade Center's pit from the re-opened PATH station. At night the site is lit with floodlights and the effect is quite eerie. |
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El Greco at the met. It's a great show,
especially his portraiture. My favorite is
his portrait of A Cardinal. For me this
painting forms part of a trio with Raphael's
portrait of Pope Julius II and Velasquez' portrait of a scowling Pope Innocent X. Completely unrelated, Blue Jake has a series of nightime photos of Nolita, my neighborhood. |
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The reopened PATH station at the World Trade Center.
The station has a sparse elegance and I really like how
it's open to the elements, something which seems very
unusual for a subway station. Entereing and leaving the
station on the train you get a close-up view of the pit.
I think it's really fantastic that the Port Authority got this
back up and running so quickly.
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Casa do Pao de Queijo in Newark's Ironbound Section.
Hot pao de queijo, coxihna, guarana, mango juice. mmmm.
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 | Hi. I'm a 33 year-old American currently living in Buenos Aires. Before that I lived in California, Sao Paulo and New York and if you browse through the archives below you can see photos of all those places. Currently I'm posting most of my pictures on BuenosAiresPhotographer.com. I also have an old geocities page with some outdated information but also more photos of Buenos Aires, friends and my 9/11 pictures. |