Pedestrians
“It is indeed a different nature that speaks to the camera than that which speaks to the eye . . .”
- Walter Benjamin, from A Short History of Photography, 1931
The act of watching people on the street is an act of imagination. We do not know the particulars of the lives of the strangers we see there, yet we assign them roles in our imagination. We indulge our fantasies, which is part of the great seduction of street life.
In 2009 I started watching and photographing pedestrians in New York City for a project that has continued for over ten years. In these photographs I have tried to push the image toward abstraction without it losing entirely the specific reality of the moment in which it was made. These images are not staged fictions. Their vitality depends on the spontaneous unfolding of events below me as I photograph from various perches above the sidewalks of New York City. My intention is to show something that becomes visual only by being photographed.
Gregory Spaid, 2024
