The Camera Club of New York

The New Yorker, 2008

I began this project after a trip down to Chinatown last January 2008. I decided to photograph Canal Street, end to end, to capture the variety and chaos of this famous crosstown street. One resulting image, seen below as the Shopgirl, inspired me to extend the project to include not just shopkeepers I see on the streets, but all people whom I might encounter going to and from work everyday. I photograph as I walk, holding the camera in my hand at hip level. My goal is to capture people without their knowledge. Most hardly notice they are being photographed unless I get too blatant about it. I seek to interpret my encounters with people within the time span of a few seconds. Like the way encounters happen on the subway, for maybe 3-5 minutes you are in a train car with a group of people...sometimes face to face. It is random as to who you get to sit next to... and then you step off the train and they are gone forever... The streets of Manhattan still have an energy. It is worldly, it is anonymous, it scares, and it soothes. While Walker Evans and others have explored New York City using these techniques, I think it useful to update the representation of the New Yorker on occasion. Certainly things have changed and are morphing along just as the city always has for hundreds of years. This portrait technique is rather unexplored I think. If the goal of portraiture is to capture the essense of the person, within and without, then keeping them in a natural, unposed state is more ideal. I use a 28mm lens and a center weighted autofocus to keep my shutter speed reasonably fast. The wide angle lens also gathers in part of the architecture of the background.