In taking these snapshots from 2004-2005, I
relied on two things: the automatic settings on a digital
pocket camera, and the chance that something good might happen
in front of my lens.
New York City is the perfect laboratory for
this approach. In a city so dense and lively, I could hope that
in any location, at any moment, in whatever direction I pointed
the camera and from any angle, something interesting was likely
to fill my pictorial space. Occasionally this turned out to be
true.
These photos are all happy accidents. While some of them have conventional formal
properties of focus, lighting, depth, color, composition and so
on, I tried to look beyond those limitations. These are
pictures that, to me, capture a richer, truer essence of New
York. They have the qualities of energy or emotion that define
the city for me as an outsider.
And perhaps it’s an illusion, but I
believe that there’s a palpable, visible difference in
the the way New Yorkers look in the aftermath of September 11.
I wanted to capture the people of New York in a manner that
showed them to be as warm and generous and tolerant as always.
Yet there’s a new undercurrent of defiance, tempered by a
degree of trepidation, that I believe can be read in their
faces. More so than ever, New Yorkers seem ready for anything.