Vivienne Benitz is a featured columnist at Grit Daily. She is originally from Germany and is a publicist at an international PR agency based in the United States.

ZTE’s wholly owned subsidiary, Nubia, has been teasing its next camera-centric flagship, the Z60 Ultra, for a few weeks now. Today, the Chinese company announced the Z60 Ultra is available for pre-order globally with prices starting at $600 / €679 / £679.

The main selling point of the Z60 Ultra is the high-definition triple camera setup, which features advanced OIS (optical image stabilization). According to nubia, the Z60 Ultra is equipped with an innovative NeoVision photography system that consists of three main cameras: 18mm ultra-wide, 35mm precision master, and 85mm telephoto explorer camera with high-definition optics.

The new 50-megapixel 18mm ultra-wide-angle starry sky main camera features a 1/1.55-inch outsole sensor, a 7P aspherical lens, and an f/1.8 large aperture. On the other hand, the 50-megapixel 35mm camera includes a 1G-6P lens and f/1.59 large aperture, enhancing light intake, pixel density and photo clarity.

Last but not least, the 85m periscope telephoto portrait lens with a 1/2-inch sensor promises to significantly improve portrait photography. The phone’s camera system supports triple OIS (optical image stabilization), allowing users to take clear pictures in all shooting scenarios. On top of that, the camera is equipped with a blue glass spin-coated IR filter, which reduces glare.

But the phone doesn’t bring just hardware improvements over many other camera-oriented flagships, but also software enhancements. For the first time, the Z60 Ultra comes with nubia’s Galaxy Night Scene algorithm, which optimizes and adjusts effects on ultra-wide angles. Also, the unique starry sky portrait algorithm allows for clear portraits against the backdrop of the Milky Way, a quite meme-able achievement.

Not to mention that the phone features the industry-s largest front-facing single-pixel photosensitive area of 2.8μm, couple with a front-facing transparent algorithm to further improve the brightness and clarity of selfies and video calls.

The rest of the phone’s specs are just as impressive. Nubia’s new flagships boasts a stunning 6.8-inch AMOLED display with 2480 x 1116 pixels resolution, 120Hz refresh rate, 2.5D flexible straight screen, and anti-accidental touch design. Nubia claims the screen covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 wide color gamut and supports a 1.07 billion color display with a peak brightness of up to 1500nit.

On the inside, the Z60 Ultra packs Qualcomm’s most powerful chipset to date, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which significantly enhances CPU and GPU performance and energy efficiency. The powerful chipset is complemented by 8/256GB, 12/256GB, or 16/512GB of memory.

The nubia Z60 Ultra drains energy from a 6,000 mAh silicon carbon negative ultra-large capacity battery. It’s also important to add that the phone is IP68-rated dust and water resistance.

The powerful device is available in two colors options, Black and Silver, although customers in China can also purchase the classic Starry Sky Collection Edition (see picture above). The latter is inspired by Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” one of the world’s most famous paintings.

The nubia Z60 Ultra will hit shelves on December 29, while Amazon will start selling the phone on January 6, 2024.

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UNION COUNTY, NJ — The Gallery-on-the-Boulevard will present a collection of photographs captured by fine art photographer Jacki Dickert titled “Scenic Union County.” It will open in January and close at the end of April 2024.

Dickert is a participating member of the New Jersey photography community, serving as an artist, teacher and judge. A prolific artist, her images have been exhibited in numerous galleries around the state as well as being published on book covers, in textbooks and in magazines including Backpacker and The Sun. She has served as judge for the Union County Teen Arts Festival and NJ Federation of Camera Clubs, among others.

Dickert won first place in the Ansel Adams photography contest, hosted by the Fenimore Art Museum in NY, and also had work accepted into the Newark Liberty International Airport New Terminal A exhibit – NJ: Journey of Surprises. She is a salon level member of the Camera Naturalist Photo Club and a popular speaker with the NJ Federation of Camera Clubs.

Since retiring from teaching elementary school, she now teaches private photography classes, does workshops for all ages and leads group photowalks.

Speaking of her work, she said, “I feel great wonder and joy in the world around me. In awe of what I find in nature, I love the land, plants, patterns and little corners of the world that I discover in my frequent wanderings there. I would like the viewing of my photographs to be a rich experience, evoking emotion and stimulating the imagination. Ultimately, I hope that my work allows viewers to be touched by the magic and beauty that is always around us.”

Dickert’s portfolio and blog may be found at www.lightdance.org.
All artwork is available for purchase by contacting the artist.
The exhibit is free and open to the public during regular library hours. For more information, call 908-276-2451.

Photos Courtesy of Barbara Wirkus

Australian photographer Krystle Wright made history as she was named winner of the Red Bull Illume contest – the world’s largest adventure and action sports imagery contest – becoming the first female photographer its 17-year history to take home the grand prize.

Her picture shows climber Angela VanWiemeersch illuminated in a crack, deep within Long Canyon, Utah, in the United States. “This is incredible. I wanted to earn my place in this industry and my work to get recognized. Red Bull Illume is the only platform that truly recognizes what we do,” Wright said.

She explained “that the idea hit [her] like a lightning bolt” and only came about once she had “embraced boredom” in her life.

“What a spectacular feeling it was to witness the crack come alive as the darkness enveloped around us,” Wright added.

The power of nature

There were several other spectacular shots that were recognized in various different categories at the contest.

The below image – taken by Ted Grambeau – of surfer and “local legend” Jimmy McKean, took home first place in the Energy Category.

Grambeau describes his experience capturing the shot as “one of the most extreme days at the incredibly challenging Shipstern Bluff on a remote stretch of coast in Tasmania, Australia.”

A plethora of pastels

A colorful image of BMX rider Senad Grosic on the La Muralla Roja apartment complex in Calp (near Alicante), Spain, was named the winner of the Sölden Category.

“This building is just a miracle itself – there are stairs, small corridors, platforms and concrete walls everywhere and it’s very easy to lose orientation,” said photographer Lorenz Holder. “Just walking through this masterpiece is breathtaking and you feel instantly transferred into a different world.

“For Senad and I, this was just an playground with almost unlimited spots and opportunities, where we both could live out our creativity.”

Sandy stairs

The winner of the Playground by Radiant Photo Category was this shot of freerider Kilian Bron taking on one of the highest sand dunes in the world, located in Peru.

“We had to have good weather and all conditions come together,” said Jean-Baptiste Liautard, who captured the breathtaking image. “I was suffering from a knee injury and had to climb up the 500m (roughly 1,640 feet) high dune with almost just one leg.

“[The pattern] was so perfect it almost looked fake.”

Waterfall wonders

Gonzalo Robert Parraguez won the Emerging with Canon Category with this striking image from Chile.

Parraguez explained the commitment it took to obtain this shot.

“To get to the waterfall, you had to drive two hours, walk 10 minutes and then to take this photo I had to do a 15-meter (roughly 49.2-foot) rappel as the waterfall is in a deep canyon,” he said.

“I think this is one of my favorite photos as it included a bit of everything.”

Red Bull Illume says it showcases the most creative and captivating adventure and action sports imagery, while illuminating the passion, lifestyle and culture behind the photographers that shoot them.

A fascinating short documentary about a photographer who shoots the Golden Gate Bridge every single day has been published by The San Francisco Standard.

The brief film follows Jake Ricker who has spent the last six years visiting the iconic Californian landmark with increased regularity.

Ricker says he began going to the bridge in 2017 before eventually visiting seven days a week for 10 hours each day from around 2020 onwards.

“I think in like the last three years I’ve maybe missed like 10 to 15 days total,” Ricker says in the video.

Ricker has always had a fascination with the Golden Gate Bridge, particularly the iconic images that have been shot there over the years.

“I just kind of thought, what would happen if one photographer went there all day every day and made one body of work,” he says.

“This is all I do, I don’t have real income or a real job I just kind of go to the bridge every day and then make side money after and live off of my credit card. It’s not the most responsible thing but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

Ricker shoots mostly on film which he calls an “endless money pit.” He even shot eight rolls of film in a single day which is $100. The San Francisco Standard visited Ricker’s apartment where he showed them bags and bags of film which he thinks holds 40,000 photos.

“I’ll get to the film eventually and hopefully it all comes out good but it’s like being out there and getting it is more important than sitting in a room scanning for the next six months,” he adds.

Ricker says it’s amazing how much photographers can witness by just “posting up in one spot and letting the world come to you.”

Dark Side of the Bridge

Devastatingly, the Golden Gate Bridge is synonymous with suicide. Authorities have recently begun installing a net to prevent them.

Ricker says over the years he has “played a role in intervening on around 90 or so people” and thinks that when the net is finished that might be a good ending point for the project after which he might make a book or do a show.

More of Ricker’s work can be found on his Instagram or website.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.

Growing-up in upper Manhattan, on 151st Street between Broadway and Riverside, I always thought of my neighborhood as Harlem or Sugar Hill. Mom, who’d lived in the area since the mid-1950s, referred to it as Hamilton Grange, named after the post office located on 146th between Broadway and Amsterdam. Decades later others, especially real estate agents, referred to that section of New York City as Hamilton Heights. Though we may not always agree on the section’s name, for certain when you get off of the subway at 145th and Broadway you’re uptown.

While the community has a rich history that includes former resident Alexander Hamilton, for whom the territory was named, the many literary figures raised within those blocks including J.D. Salinger, who lived in the grand Halidon Court on 153rd Street until he was 9, and the towering apartment buildings (“pre-war,” their modern day listings read) designed by renowned architects including Emory Roth, Neville & Biggie and Mulliken & Moeller.

As a writer I’ve often used the neighborhood as a locale in both essays and short fiction, weaving places, faces and literal old schools into various narratives. Having moved to 628 West 151 Street (River Cliff apartments) in 1967 when I was 4, I resided there for twenty-five years. Somewhere along my literary journey I began looking online for old pictures of the community to jog my memory.

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It was while researching the area for the 2013 story “Jaguar and the Jungleland Boogie,” an adventure tale published in Black Pulp, edited by Gary Phillips, that I discovered the wondrous photography of Thaddeus Wilkerson. A turn of the century documentarian of the city, Wilkerson’s stark street photography were used for postcards that he published himself. His pictures of New York City, more than four hundred of Manhattan alone, were produced from 1909 through 1916, with the majority produced in 1910 and 1911.

Born in 1872, Wilkerson, an Ohio native, was 37 when he started shooting his adopted city. His pictures have a strange quality that is reminiscent of noir. Though the genre wouldn’t launch until decades after Wilkerson’s most prolific period, his work shares the same expressionistic sensibilities. Since Wilkerson had a full-time job, I imagine taking photos began as a hobby before becoming an obsession. His views included street life, as well as various hotels, churches, municipal buildings, monuments and parks.

There are few people in his pictures, making me wonder if he was shy or simply preferred shooting buildings. Each picture had the subject’s address written on the right of the image and his signature “TW” on the left. Wilkerson’s photos, much like the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, were a celebration of the rising city, a tribute to urbanism and a town on the come up. It was Wilkerson’s photo of PS. 186, one of my old schools, which made me notice him.

Located on both 145th and 146th with courtyards on each side, the massive school was built in 1902 and was the handy work of American architect Charles B.J. Snyder. The school’s mailing address listed as 521 West 145th Street, it was directly across the street from Wilkerson’s apartment building at 522 West 145th; his address was printed on the back left side of each postcard.

There was a spooky quality to Wilkerson’s pristine photo. He watermarked the picture, Public School 186. As though taken early on a Sunday morning, there are no people in the shot. The street too is bare, devoid of either horses or cars. The picture is so quiet you can see the silence.

PS 186 was an only a few years old when the picture was taken, and the clean building had an aura of promise and ambition. I imagine Wilkerson staring out of the window at dawn as the sun rose over PS 186, being struck by the brutal beauty of the structure and wanting to capture that exquisiteness with his bulky camera.

Almost sixty years later, when I started first grade at PS 186, the building was dirty. A building that I remember as dark and drafty with wrought iron staircases; in 1969 the building, with its layers of lead paint, was six years away from being condemned. I was a six-year-nerd who’d previously gone to a private Black prep academy known as the Modern School. However, because of a domestic rift between my parents, my father refused to pay the tuition and I wound-up in public school.

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As a pudgy, unathletic boy, I wasn’t prepared to enter the rowdy lion’s den and felt a sense of dread from the moment I entered the courtyard. Stepping inside the building that first day, the school had a gothic appearance that reminded me of something out of a Dickens’ story. I don’t have many memories of that year, but I did make friends with a wild Spanish kid named Richie. We were buddies in class, where the young white woman teacher often had a frightened expression on her face.

Thankfully, Richie also nominated himself as my bodyguard and came to my rescue when some bad asses tried to mug me in the staircase. “Leave him alone,” he screamed from the top of the stairs. My protector had juice and the other kids scattered. Those boys never bothered me again. PS 186 shut down in 1975, and abandoned for decades. In the passing years I could clearly see the crumbling brick exterior and wildlife growing out of the windows.

In 1986, the beginning of the crack cocaine era in our hood, I ran into Richie on the Broadway and 145th Street coming out of the subway station. He had been released from prison a few days before. Like a lot of young men in our neighborhood in the mid-1980s, he had gotten into the drug business. “You know there’s a crew of crack fiends living in our old school,” Richie said, nodding towards PS 186. “I’ve seen them jumping over the gates. It’s crazy.”

As a fan of decaying buildings in urban settings, I began visiting PS 186 often, standing on the crumbling staircase that I first climbed years before. Though I believed Richie, I never saw anybody through those broken windows. “Be careful on them steps, there’s a lot of rats under there,” a woman warned me one gloomy afternoon. After thanking her, I turned back around and continued to gaze at the trash filled courtyard.

In “Jaguar and the Jungleland Boogie” I described the desolate school this way: “Once the premier shining jewel of the community, time and decay had faded it from its former splendor. Sold to a local church in 1979 with promises of making it into a Boys and Girls Club, the conversion was never completed and the school was left to rot.” Today the building, by some miracle, is still standing and has been converted into apartments.

In 1970, I was sent back the Modern School for second and third grade. After I began to dread my bougie teacher Miss Wilson, who played the same classical album for the class every day at lunch and scratched my Shaft album when snatching the needle off when Isaac Hayes muttered, “Damn right.”

Months later I entered fourth grade at St. Catherine of Genoa. Located at 506 West 153rd Street next door to the church and rectory, the school wasn’t yet built when Wilkerson took pictures of the same block I walked every school day for the five years. I recall our sixth grade history teacher Mr. Waters telling the class how our neighborhood was once farmland and how Alexander Hamilton settled there, hence the name.

It wasn’t until the late 19th century, with the expansion of the subway system, that the area became more developed. Originally populated with German, Irish and Jewish immigrants, it wasn’t until the 1920s that Black people began to filter into the neighborhood. Still, while the nationalities changed, the landscape remained the same.

In the era that I had lived there, the neighborhood was majority Black and Hispanic. It was on 153rd between Broadway and Amsterdam where I rushed to the rectory in my altar boy gear on Sunday mornings for 9 o’clock mass and where I once played football so badly that I ran the wrong way, scoring a touchdown for the other team. It was on that quiet block where I sat with my friend Raymond Torres in his father’s car listening to the radio at lunchtime and, while in seventh grade, I stood against the wall of Trinity Church Cemetery with a hammer waiting for a rumble to jump off.

Though we’d gotten out of school for a half day, word had gone around earlier that Stitt, a nearby junior high known for its knuckleheads and troublemakers, wanted to jump us. While we weren’t an official gang, we were ready for whatever; in my mind there was a West Side Story/Sharks vs. Jets fantasy brewing. Everything was everything until cops from the 30th precinct, men who we knew by face from church, came to the block and made us go home.

In Wilkerson’s picture we can see a horse and buggy in the background while in the foreground there is a couple standing in front of the cemetery. It was inside that boneyard where mom used to take me to feed the squirrels until the morning we ran out of nuts and was chased out by the aggressive rodents. It was also in Trinity Cemetery where a St. Catherine’s schoolmate Armando Morales was found hanging from a tree one morning. Though I didn’t know him personally, Morales’ death was a shock to our school community.

Whether he was killed or committed suicide, I never knew, but the incident haunted me for years. In 2023 I fictionalized the hanging and creepy cemetery in the story “The King of Broadway” published in Rock and a Hard Place. “Constructed over a century ago, its gray stones sparkled under the sun’s glimmer,” the narrator thought. “Wild ivy scaled the walls that surrounded the vast cemetery from Broadway to Amsterdam. A rusty wrought-iron design on top was supposed to keep the riff-raff from climbing over.”

Diagonally across the street from the cemetery was Halidon Court, another building that St. Catherine kids passed every day and where Raymond’s grandmother lived. We often visited his grandmother’s first floor apartment at lunchtime. She was a sweet, stout woman who had no problem feeding us as telenovelas played on in the living room. Though granny couldn’t speak English she and I somehow communicated.

Halidon Court was built in 1910, and Wilkerson captured the building’s regal beauty. Though there are two figures standing in front of the building, like most of Wilkerson’s photos of apartment houses there’s a gothic sensibility in seeing these castle sized abodes perched atop of steep hills with the Hudson River in the background.

There is very little biographical information on Wilkerson, and the most that I found was published in Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People’s Photography by Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh (2006): “Born and raised in Spring Hill (near Clarksville), Ohio, Wilkerson is one of the most collectible New York City photo postcard photographer. He was an employee of Burroughs Adding Machine Company for more than forty years.”

Author Michael Henry Adams, writer of the wonderful coffee table book Harlem Lost and Found, wrote in his blog, “Wilkerson, like no-one else, focused on making compelling images of uptown Manhattan. His depictions, which once might have been regarded as quite ordinary, are an invaluable and rare record, rendered extraordinary by the dramatic way in which, even where buildings have remained the same, everyday life here has changed completely.” In a few of Wilkerson’s images the streets are deserted, as though upper Manhattan was a ghost town. The metropolis was on the rise, but some of Wilkerson’s images made it look like a small town with big buildings.

Still, in other pictures we see suited men in hats alongside women clad in long dresses walking in groups up Broadway or strolling along Riverside Drive. “Wilkerson’s work and the way he captured the city reminds me of both Eugène Atget and Charles Marville,” says photographer Alice Arnold. “They’re all making city images, capturing the urban landscape as it is transformed by the forces of modernity. Wilkerson’s images are haunting, but there is also an aspirational feel to them. He made these photos to sell as picture postcards, which was a booming business in those days. But remember, in 1910 cameras were heavy, required tripods, and you only had one shot to get it right.”

One of my earliest memories of childhood uptown was May 22, 1967. It was a sunny Monday morning and I, at four years old, was seated at the kitchen table having breakfast. Mom, who had just finished making eggs and sausages, was still standing by the stove when we heard a loud explosion that sounded like a bomb. “What was that? Mom screamed, turning off the stove. She quickly got me in a coat and we hurried outside.

At the bottom of the hill people gathered on Riverside Drive, leaning over the granite parapet wall. Making our way onto the drive, we too looked over the wall, shocked to see two freight trains had crashed into one another. The tracks were near the Hudson, and that day we could see New Jersey clearly.

There were flames coming from the diesel engines and, looking like the toys of a giant, boxcars billowing smoke were scattered across the tracks. Years later I depicted the tracks and freight trains in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine short story “The Life and Times of Big Poppa,” who came into town riding in a boxcar that he leapt from in 1944 and soon discovered the streets of Harlem.

The morning of the train crash firemen and police were on the scene carrying away the dead and wounded. “This is about as bad as you will find,” Mayor John Lindsey told reporters. An N.Y.P.D. friend of mom, a uniformed cop named Alvin Ingram, approached us. “You guys don’t want to be down here,” he warned. “You don’t really want to see this.”

Walking back to the corner of 151st Street I recall looking across the street at the towering buildings 740 and 745 Riverside Drive. In the shadow of those structures everything else was small. Years later I’d write an essay (“The Boogeyman Buildings” for CrimeReads) about how frigthening they were when I was a kid.

Seeing Wikerson’s pictures on Michael Henry Adams website “Style & Taste” gave me some perspective of the buildings elegance in the time before crime, drugs and fire made it them an eyesore for thirty-five years. Additionally, the same could be said for Wilkerson’s picture of 601 Broadway (151st Street), another massive building that lost its luster mid 20th-century.

Thaddeus Wilkerson was 71 years old when he died in New York City from a streptococcus throat infection in 1943. Though he lived a long life, his photography career seemingly only lasted for few years. Miraculously, the structures he shot are still standing. While his obituary in a Clarksville, Ohio newspaper cited that he was avid writer of letters to friends and family, there was no mention of his photographs.

Thankfully Thaddeus Wilkerson’s images managed to survive the near century since they were taken. Although he hasn’t achieved the name recognition as New York City chroniclers Walker Evans, Helen Levitt or Saul Leiter, for me his photographs of the town are just as significant.

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Thaddeus Wilkerson images can be seen on the Museum of the City of New York website. Thanks to Alice Arnold and Michael Henry Adams for their guidance.