The Portfolio
To Think I Almost Missed You is my farewell letter to New York City, my home for the last 8 years. As my departure loomed, I felt compelled to try to capture my own “New York Project”. The photos are extreme close-ups taken in Times Square throughout the course of several months. The photos depict a very limited world, as they are framed very tightly on the subjects. They do not give the viewer too many details about where we are or what is going on in the environment, but rather depict snippets of life, facial expressions, and small gestures that would otherwise get lost amidst the chaos.
It is not a project about Times Square per se, but Times Square becomes a precious location as the confusion, the noise, and the constant flow of people populating it make it representative of a larger context. After all, a place where everybody is constantly photographing and looking at everything that surrounds them can look a lot like a place where no one is watching or paying really attention to their surroundings. The unstoppable crowd creates a sort of perfect anonymity where, surprisingly, intimacy thrives.
Like the philosopher Kracauer argued in his Film Theory, the tele-lens here works as a magnifying glass, revealing all the small things that are so easy for the naked eye to miss. It is a hunt for the unlikely, for those moments of vulnerability and honesty that can hardly be associated with a crowd, with Times Square, and perhaps more in general, with New York as well.
