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 don’t give the viewer many details about where we are or what’s happening in the environment; instead, they capture snippets of life, facial expressions, and small gestures that would otherwise get lost amid 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 really paying attention to their surroundings. The unstoppable crowd creates a sort of perfect anonymity where, surprisingly, intimacy thrives.
As the philosopher Kracauer argued in his Theory of Film, the telephoto 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 generally, with New York as well.
