A photo director who I have worked with a lot over the years recently told me how she’d watched my pictures of New York evolve over the time I’ve lived here. To begin with, they were all heroic America: the Stars and Stripes, the epic buildings, the extraordinary scale of everything. But the longer I’ve been here, the more I’ve focused on the small stuff, the little moments that make the city what it is, possibly a product of slowly becoming less awed by the place.
When I’m taking photographs of New York, I’m always thinking about the great street photographers who have gone before, like Saul Leiter and William Eggleston. And increasingly I think I’m trying to channel their spirit, the way they looked for beauty in the everyday and a fresh angle on something so familiar.
People in who live in New York are constantly in a state of mourning. Whoever you talk to, the city was always better 20 years ago. And you can get into that mindset as a photographer, but you have to remember that everything that feels mundane and obvious now – the cars, the billboards, the fashions – will be gone in 20 years and people will be feeling nostalgic about them.
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