Face New York

After significant life changes, photography became a way to re-enter the world. I began spending long days moving through New York, following whatever caught my attention. At first, I thought I was collecting interesting faces. The more photographs I made, the less satisfying that explanation became.

The people who initially stopped me were often visually remarkable. Still, the photographs I kept returning to were not always the loudest. They were the ones that gave me something I had not consciously asked for: an ambiguous expression, a hand caught in tension, another figure entering the frame, or a strange correspondence between a person and the surrounding street.

That changed how I worked. I stopped trying to separate people from the city and began allowing more of the world into the photograph. Crowds, reflections, passing bodies, storefronts, and accidents became active parts of the frame. The person may begin the picture, but they do not necessarily determine what the picture becomes.

Some photographs are candid. Others come from a glance, a gesture of acknowledgment, or a brief conversation. I usually know very little about the people I photograph, and I want the images to retain that uncertainty. They are not biographies or conclusions about strangers. I continue because the work keeps surprising me. A photograph can begin with appearance and end somewhere less identifiable: performance, solitude, vanity, fatigue, humor, defiance, or simply the friction of one human presence against another.

One image holds an encounter. Seen together, the photographs begin to create their own New York: not a census of personalities, but a visual rhythm made from faces, gestures, and moments that briefly become impossible to ignore.