Midtown Commute

In the early 2010s, I worked at B&H Photo’s corporate office on 34th Street. I was living in Astoria, Queens, so, like thousands of other New Yorkers, I commuted into Midtown Manhattan each weekday. Between 2012 and 2014, I photographed my walks through Midtown, mostly along 34th Street, up Fifth Avenue, and around 42nd Street. I was fascinated by joining the moving masses and watching pedestrians of every background and motivation stream in all directions. It reminded me of the Manhattan street photographs of Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, and, more recently, Gus Powell, whose book The Company of Strangers was an early inspiration. Eventually I put the camera down, and for years the photographs sat in the archive, until I came to understand how they fit within the transit cluster of my multi-volume project NYC Public Strata: 2009–2021.