Dashwood Books

What's the point? (of view)
The Art of Observation & Perspective

While all the photos on Newest York are original iPhone snaps, I don't claim to be a professional photographer.

I am a perspective enthusiast. Something, I think we all have opportunity to be in the world of cell phone cameras, hand-held videos, and the beauty of YouTube.

Dashwood Books is a shop selling photography books for the connoisseur. There is no mistaking the love with which these books have been collected, curated, and laid out for sale. It could overwhelm the amateur. I am one such amateur, and so I switched my mind set. I took in the shop as one perspective enthusiast to another.

Through this lens there offered were perspectives from around the globe. Industrial, rural, and the overtly sexual. I didn't spend long, though I suspect a return trip in the near future. It's a unique opportunity to slow down, and choose the images that come to you, rather than passively receiving them into your brain at a high-speed frame rate through conventional media.

This sort of shop is dying out. Books stores (photography or otherwise) are closing all over the nation in favor of online options. So it's right then that Dashwood felt more like a small, meticulously kept museum than a shop. Austere, but beautiful. I'll add too the smell of old bindings lends character, a deep personality, evocative of a posh professor's 1963 study.

If you have the opportunity, happen by Dashwood. Extract even 20 minutes from a harried schedule and absorb the perspective of others. We like tunnel vision in New York. It's what gets us through, how we persevere. But tunnel vision allows for little perspective but our own, and a limited view at that.

Look at one book. Dare to expand to two. Push your limits to three and see what happens on the other side.

You may just step out into a new world, and that's the whole point.

INFO:
Dashwood Books
33 Bond Street (btw Lafayette & Bowery)
212.387.8520
www.dashwoodbooks.com