Dialogues of the Lower East Side, 2015-2017

During previous incarnations as an editorial photographer and even as a portraitist, I’d always been a documentarian of the human condition, taking on projects that involved the homeless, poverty and urban blight, as well as ethnographic studies in Central and South America, and Indonesia. But no matter what I’d photographed, my underlying intention was to connect — to create an understanding between my subject and the viewer, even if that viewer was only me. I still shoot what is real and in front of me, but photographing people had become a reactive exercise and now I want to be contemplative--to slow down and give myself the opportunity to look more closely--at everything. I spend several months a year near New York and go to the city once or twice a week. I’d lived there full time earlier in my career, but had lost sight of the minutiae, the fine details of life that were in front of me, and as those details became background, what was unique had become ordinary. These days I have time to walk the streets and feel the rawness of street life as it exists in the City, without the weight of other agendas. As the city continues to grow, gentrify, and replace its core population, those who struggle to stay and survive rely on outlets of private communication that are in plain sight — coded messages expressing frustration and anger, resentment and resolution—encrypted for their own consumption. These are visual dialogues. Now that minutiae has become foreground as amazing abstractions emerge in an ever-changing collage of arguments and proclamations about turf and the politics of the ‘hood. They inhabit bulletin boards of brick, glass, backdoors and entryways, tucked between the new buildings of a city that’s constantly reinventing itself. Derived from a historical context of earlier graffiti artists, this current wave of work doesn’t scream from the sides of subway cars. While the medium still uses spray paint; stickers, stencils, waybills and wheat paste have been added to the mix. I want these prints to have the vitality and cacophony of the urban street, and engage the viewer in that dialogue. I’m using the print medium to make that connection while attempting to honor the subject with a more substantive voice in the process. To that end, I’ve reworked my view of what a photographic print is, what I can do with it, and what it represents. The images are large, up to four feet on their longest edge. The three dimensionality of the print is immediately apparent, the spray paint mimicked on the surface of the print through the tweaking of the ink jet process, while stickers and wheat paste look as if they can be readily peeled from the surface of the cotton rag medium. After all, New York is still a city of artists, with the city itself being the canvas. The ability to express that reality in print has become an obsession. I’ve been fortunate to have had a career that has fully bridged both the analog and digital worlds, and as such now allows me as much self expression on the back end of the process as it's always given me on the front end.