“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” - Henry David Thoreau
I am a street photographer. Translation: I am a sneak-thief grabbing small stories one frame at a time.
I ply my thievery with a camera on the streets of New York City. It was harmless enough in the beginning. Moving to New York from Memphis may have been a culture shock, but 1970’s New York was also a visual shock. The city was going bankrupt - police and sanitation layoffs, blackouts, rubble, graffiti and burned out buildings - yet the layers of grit gave everything added depth. I loved it immediately. This place seemed to be a forbidden city,
I know I have romanticized this time and place. Times Square, or The Deuce as 42 Street was known, the peep shows and dive bars, the art of subway graffiti, the squatters and artists on the Lower East Side colonizing empty buildings, were all a part of why I will always see New York streets in black and white. A film noir.
I sometimes seek out places with that same feel - they are still out there - but I’m not looking to recreate that time. Today’s New York still gives me what I crave when I pick up a camera; the idiosyncratic, the off-kilter, the darkly humorous.
These images tell some of those stories. If you prefer, you can think of them as borrowed - not stolen.