The Boulder at Paidge Ave.
Photographs made during my first years living in New York, accumulated through walking Brooklyn and Manhattan. The sequence concludes with an image that later became legible as the first signal in a long-term inquiry into the city’s pedestrian networks and public spaces.
Statement
Background
The Boulder at Paidge Ave. follows an earlier body of work made in Los Angeles between 2004 and 2008. After leaving Los Angeles, I spent a brief period in St. Cloud, Minnesota before relocating to New York City in early 2009, during the onset of the Great Recession.
Project
The Boulder at Paidge Ave. gathers photographs made over the course of two to three years while wandering Brooklyn and Manhattan on foot.
The images were not initially produced as part of a defined project. They accumulated gradually through over the years as I settled into field work routine. At the time, there was no clear direction or outcome.
Only at the end of the book does the boulder appear.
It was photographed near Paidge Avenue, marking the entrance to the Newtown Creek Nature Walk—a place I had unknowingly bypassed despite years of walking the surrounding neighborhoods. When the photograph was made, it registered as incidental. Its significance emerged later, through reflection and by studying the image alongside maps.
In hindsight, the boulder functions as a hinge. It does not explain the photographs that precede it, but it reframes them. What once appeared as drifting begins to cohere as a pattern of attention, toward pedestrian networks, overlooked green spaces, and the connective tissue of the city encountered at walking speed.
A decade later, while walking the abandoned Montauk Cutoff during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I turned south toward Greenpoint, in the direction of that boulder. The distance between those two points closed a twelve-year loop. What had felt unstructured revealed itself as a continuous inquiry.
This book is not the beginning of NYC Public Strata in intention. It is the point at which the direction of the work becomes legible in retrospect. The boulder appears at the end, but it signals what follows.
I’m an photographer and marketing specialist living in Minneapolis. This is my newsletter on art, walking, urbanism and mindfulness.
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