Kevin Smith

Face New York

Face New York is an ongoing series made through brief encounters with strangers across the city. The pictures begin with an instinct: a face, a gesture, a posture, or the unexpected relationship between a person and the street around them. I rarely know what a photograph means while making it, and I do not ask it to explain the person. I am interested in what appears when expression, light, surrounding bodies, and chance briefly align. Some subjects meet the camera; others remain absorbed in their own experience. Over time, the work has moved from isolated portraits toward photographs in which the city participates. Seen together, the images form an accumulation of charged encounters, each specific, unresolved, and open to the viewer.