Our millennial photographer uses a telephone to photograph (a cellphone camera) so as to be more spontaneous and intuitive, to allow the photographs to surprise him and, perhaps, us.
Do his pictures tell us about New York and its people or about his experience of New York? Do they tell us about other pictures or about the photographer himself? Or do they tell us about ourselves, our civilizations, our time on this earth? The answer, of course, is yes.
A young man wanders throughout New York, a foreign city, globalized, snapping pictures with his telephone (is this where the story begins?).
But this is not so strange. His pictures represent, like the telephone, a conversation. They are a call and a response, an attempt to ferret out the authenticity of what he sees, to point out the strangeness, to record the unfolding of days and nights, to later find what he might have missed. If the city is image then it can be put in his pocket; its enormity becomes manageable.
Extract from Fred Ritchin’s text
