Alone on Broadway

2020, photography, archival inkjet prints

Artist Statement

These photographs were made during a two-week trip to New York City in January 2020. I had never been to New York, so my idea of the city was a derivative of the movies and books I grew up with. In my essentialized view, New York was Broadway. To confront this idea, I walked along Broadway from the southern tip of Manhattan through the places I only knew in the abstract; the ticker tape in the financial district, the endless light of Times Square, the brownstone of the Upper West Side, and the dollar pizza joints that stretch through Harlem and into the Bronx. Of course, New York is not buildings, lights, and pizza alone. Absent from my initial view of New York were the people that call this iconic street home. The margins where people live and work contain stories that are spared from the bright lights — stories of how it used to be, might have been, should have been. We meet as two strangers, alone, on a street that the world knows by name.