In Your Face
The energy of the city, the density of the crowds, is what inspires my various “people walking” images. For this group, I am in motion as well as my subjects. I am as much as I dare walking head-on into my subjects, as they approach me. I use a normal or slightly wide-angle lens, so I am only several feet away from my subjects at the “moment of impact”. For some reason I find this exhilarating.
It is no accident that I mostly shoot these pictures in Times Square or on Canal Street… as these are amongst the most pedestrian dense areas of the city. Crossing intersections is the most fruitful, as people are (rightfully) focusing on getting to the other side and maybe not so focused on their cell phones (or on the strange woman coming at them).
I am responding to people as moving shapes, as emotive abstractions. I may be capturing the liveliness of humanity, but I do not want any picture to be “about the person”. I want my people to be anonymous and to represent us all. So if anyone were to stop me, I’d explain that the picture I just took of them really isn’t about them at all.