On Wednesday night, Canoe Studios hosted “A Year in a New York Minute,” an exhibition and charity silent auction of photographs taken by Tyson Chandler. Those in attendance — teammates like Amar’e Stoudemire and Jason Kidd were there, as was Knicks owner Jim Dolan, Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing, and Giants great Michael Strahan — spent the night sipping Ciroc cocktails and contemplating bidding on the prints, which included shots the center took during his travels in Africa and a portrait of former teammate Jeremy Lin. But one photo in particular caught the eye of Chandler’s teammate Carmelo Anthony.
Anthony — the last guest to arrive — entered into a ferocious bidding war for one of the prints, a shot of some children Chandler encountered while in Africa. As Anthony crossed out the name of the other bidder (David Seabrooke, the 59-year-old owner of Canoe Studios) and jotted down a higher bid next to his own name, I asked him what he liked about that photograph. “It says a lot, without even saying much,” Anthony declared. I pressed him for more, but Melo simply repeated that the photo “says a lot.”
When the bidding reached roughly $3,000, Anthony (who signed a $65 million contract extension upon getting traded to New York), asked Seabrooke, “Are you going to keep this going? Or are we good if I take this down?”
“We’re good,” said Seabrooke, who said he had his eye on other photos as well. “I’ll just take another one.”