George Forss’s genius hovers around him like a cloud, I was in his darkroom this afternoon and I saw that David Douglas Duncan’s book: “George Forss: New York, New York: Masterworks Of A Street Peddler” was on a table and open to the centerpiece photograph, a stunning shot of sailboats on the East River sailing by the United Nations complex.

This was the sort of George Forss photograph Ansel Adams might have had in mind when he said George’s photos gave us images of “extraordinary vitality. He sees with an incisive eye and haunting spirit. I have seen no photographs of recent years as strong and as perceptive.”

As a photographer, I look at a photo like this and I can’t imagine how George could have taken it. It is so wise, deep and majestic, it is a perfect photograph. It captures an image, but so much more than that, it captures everything New York City wanted to be, perhaps used to be.  I asked him today how he got that shot, he said he was on Roosevelt idea, he was using a camera he found in someone’s trash and some optics he built himself, that was as far as he could go in explaining it. George can never explain to me how he took these shots, because he took in a photographic universe so radically different from mine.  I can’t imagine a lens as wide as this, getting this depth of field and contrast with any equipment I have or know about. George says he never met a camera he didn’t like, and I see that is true.

Watching George I see the time and patience – unknown to people like me in the digital age – it took to capture this photo, to study the light, to wait for the right moment, to work for hours in the darkroom and then more on the finished print. He waited for a day or so out on Roosevelt Island for this shot, spent an hour or two setting it up. My photographs are taken in second, not hours or days.

I am so grateful for George, he fills me with the excitement and promise of life every time I talk with him.