City Anonymity

Photographers, historically, have focused on two aspects of the street as subject: the socio-political character of human interactions and the occasions for expressive gesture. Great as these traditions are, I found they left out significant aspects of our actual perceptual experience of the street — its locations and people. Bringing these together has been my artistic goal. The first and most important aspect is time. In cities, most encounters with people on the street are fleeting and peripheral. People appear and disappear from view almost before we have a chance to register their presence. To capture the profound sense of transience, I use a variety of exposure and motion strategies. Some of which have been used by classic photographers but never developed in depth. There is, perhaps, an instant in our perception where the casual subject is held steady but the image is already blurred by a prior instant and degraded even further by the speed at which they become a memory never fully known. This is the other aspect my street photographer seeks to capture: anonymity. Street photographers often simply assume the alien character as a given. Taking a picture of them somehow makes them more familiar. For me, the very fact of this unknowability is a source of bittersweet wonder. We can never fully engage the many people we pass by and I don’t want to lose sight of that fact. Capturing my subjects the way I do, in the midst of their fleetingness, where time is slightly stretched, renders them extraordinary, unfamiliar, with no possibility of recognition but also strangely sculptural. I try to shoot in locations that emphasize this insubstantiality.