NYC Street Photography through the eyes of a documentary photographer

I honestly don't remember exactly why I went. It might simply have been a random trip. I had been to New York once before, when I was 21, on a road trip with friends, but this was the first time I really saw the city with a camera.

There was no project behind it. No theme. I wasn't trying to document a particular part of New York or come home with a coherent story.

I just walked around and photographed.

Looking at the pictures now, that's probably what I like most about them.

They are some of my earliest street photography, from a point where I knew enough to have instincts but not enough to constantly question those instincts.

I miss that sometimes.

Seeing New York with a camera

There is an argument that having a camera with you makes you experience a place less.

I think that's partly true.

When you're walking around looking for photographs, part of your brain is constantly scanning. You're looking at people, light, backgrounds, gestures, someone coming around a corner. Maybe you aren't taking in the city in the same way as somebody walking around without a camera.

But I think the opposite happens too.

I notice much more when I have a camera.

Faces, hands, the way two people stand next to each other, somebody looking in a strange direction, a reflection, smoke coming out of the street, little interactions that last for a second and then disappear.

So maybe you lose one kind of awareness and gain another.

New York is obviously a ridiculous place for this because there is so much happening at once. The subway alone is full of photographs. People waiting, sleeping, staring into nowhere and doing everything possible not to make eye contact with each other.

Then you come back above ground and it's completely different again.

I photographed the subway, candid moments on the streets, people disappearing into smoke and whatever else caught my attention.

I don't remember exactly which neighborhood every photograph came from. Some were probably Manhattan, some elsewhere, but I don't want to invent a perfect map of a trip I made seven years ago.

This isn't a guide to the best street photography locations in NYC.

It's what I saw.

Some of my first real street photography

When I look at these photographs now, I see somebody who was daring.

Not brave in some heroic way. More that I hadn't yet learned all the reasons not to take a photograph.

Today I know much more about photography. That should make me better, and most of the time it probably does.

But experience also makes you very good at explaining why a photograph won't work.

The background is ugly. The person isn't in exactly the right place. The light could be better. Maybe I should wait. Maybe something stronger will happen in five minutes.

When I shot these photographs, I didn't have as many of those filters.

Something looked interesting, so I took the picture.

There was probably a lot of bad photography mixed in with it, but when I look through the work now I don't mainly see mistakes.

I see raw instinct.

Some of those instincts were surprisingly good.

A lot of what later became my approach to candid photography is already somewhere in these pictures. Getting close, reacting quickly and being more interested in people than in making everything perfect.

I've always assumed more experience means better work, but I'm not completely convinced anymore.

There are bands whose first album is still their best twenty years later.

Sometimes not knowing enough is useful.

You don't know enough yet to ruin the idea.

When photography becomes your job

There was also pressure on this trip.

Photography was becoming my work, and that changes something.

People like to say that if you turn your hobby into your career, you'll never work another day in your life.

I think there is another version.

You just lost your hobby.

Once photography becomes your job, it's difficult to completely switch off the part of your brain that expects a result.

You go to New York with a camera and suddenly you think you should come home with something good.

And New York adds another layer because the city has such an enormous photographic history.

I've written about photographers like Joel Meyerowitz, Bruce Davidson and Robert Frank. Their work is very different, but New York runs through so much of the history of street and documentary photography.

Then there is William Klein, probably my favorite photographer, whose New York photographs still feel completely alive to me.

You know all of that history is there.

You know thousands of photographers have walked the same streets.

You know New York should be full of photographs.

So where is yours?

That's not necessarily a useful question to have in your head while you're trying to photograph.

The pressure to make something can easily get in the way of actually seeing something.

The Ricoh GR II

Every photograph on this page was made with the Ricoh GR II.

I've written much more about cameras in my street photography camera guide, but I still have a ridiculous amount of affection for the GR II.

I think it might be one of the best cameras ever made.

And my main reason isn't autofocus, megapixels or anything particularly technical.

It's small.

Really small.

Small enough that you don't have an excuse not to bring it.

That matters far more than people give it credit for.

A Leica can be relatively small. The Fuji X100 cameras are compact compared with most cameras. But they're still cameras you make a decision to carry. They cost enough that you think about where you're putting them, and they're large enough that you know they're there.

The Ricoh was different.

You put it in your pocket.

That's it.

There is no decision.

And because you don't have to decide whether to take the camera, you end up having a camera when something happens.

That is a pretty useful feature for street photography.

The best camera in the world doesn't help much when it's sitting at home.

Shooting street photography at 28 mm

The Ricoh GR II has a 28 mm equivalent lens.

These days I mostly shoot around a 50 mm equivalent with my Fujinon 35mm f/1.4, so looking back through these New York photographs feels surprisingly wide.

And I kind of miss it.

I actually think 28 mm requires more skill to use well.

With a longer lens, simplifying a photograph is easier. You see an interesting person, isolate them and remove much of the mess around them.

At 28 mm, everything gets invited into the picture.

People, cars, signs, buildings, hands, rubbish, somebody's shoulder coming into the edge of the frame.

There are simply more things that can go wrong.

You also have to get close.

If you want somebody to fill a meaningful part of the frame at 28 mm, standing ten metres away isn't going to do much.

You need to enter their space.

If you're photographing candidly, that can feel uncomfortable. If you're talking to somebody, it makes the portrait more intimate because you're physically close to them.

The wide lens doesn't let you hide.

That's one of the things I love about William Klein's work.

He could get extremely close while still fitting several people into the same photograph. One person didn't necessarily have to be the subject. There could be five different little things happening inside the frame.

Sometimes one photograph almost feels like a gallery of photographs.

That's very difficult to do without everything turning into visual garbage.

Looking through these NYC photographs makes me want to go wider again.

Not because 28 mm is somehow better than 50 mm.

I just think it asks something different from you.

Black and white street photography in New York

Everything here was photographed in black and white.

I've always been attracted to black and white photography, and obviously New York has an almost unfair amount of photographic history attached to black and white.

But I wasn't really thinking about that when I was walking around.

It simply made sense to me.

New York has so much information already. Signs, clothes, advertisements, traffic, reflections, shop windows, lights and people everywhere.

Removing colour gets rid of one layer.

Faces become more important. Gestures become more important. Light becomes more important.

The pictures aren't trying to explain New York.

They are just bits of New York that caught my attention during a few days.

A person on a train.

Someone walking through smoke.

People passing each other on the street.

A face I knew for thirty seconds.

That's one of the things I still like most about photography. It gives completely insignificant encounters a very long life.

The woman on the subway

There is one woman I still remember very clearly.

I met her on the subway. She was African American and had this enormous hair. She looked incredible.

More importantly, she was kind.

At that stage of my photography I hadn't photographed many people like her before, so I remember the encounter as much as I remember the photograph.

There are pictures where you remember making the photograph.

And then there are pictures where seeing them brings the person back.

This one does that.

I also remember seeing AirPods around this trip and thinking they looked strange.

Now that sounds ridiculous because everybody has seen AirPods ten billion times.

But that's another thing photography accidentally does well.

It records all the small, stupid details that nobody thinks are historically interesting.

Then seven years pass and suddenly those details tell you exactly when the photograph belongs.

Everyone in New York looked like the main character

One thing about photographing New York actually bothered me a little.

A lot of people looked too photographable.

Especially around some of the obvious commercial areas, people looked like they had already been cast to play a person in New York.

Beautiful clothes. Perfect personal style. People walking through the city as if somebody might be photographing them.

Everyone was the main character.

At first this is obviously amazing when you're doing street photography in NYC.

You point the camera somewhere and somebody already looks interesting.

But after a while I found it less interesting.

It started to feel a little like a play.

You weren't discovering the character. The character had already arrived fully dressed.

I'm obviously not saying that's New York as a whole. I spent three days there. I don't even remember exactly where every picture was taken, so I'm definitely not going to claim I understood the city.

It just made me think about what kind of people I actually enjoy photographing.

And increasingly, I think I'm more interested in people who aren't trying to look interesting.

Why Mexico City became different for me

That became much clearer through my street photography in Mexico City.

Mexico City is really where I developed as a photographer.

I spent far more time there, so of course the relationship with the city became completely different.

But I also became interested in a different type of person.

Workers. Vendors. People carrying things. People repairing something. People cooking in the street. People whose working day actually happens in public.

They use the street.

They don't just move through it.

A blue-collar worker who is physically building or maintaining part of the city is often more interesting to me than someone who happens to be wearing perfect clothes.

Not because one person is more worthy of being photographed than another.

There is simply more going on.

The person has a relationship with the environment.

They're doing something. The background isn't decoration. The street isn't just a location.

That became a big part of how I started thinking about documentary photography.

It also eventually moved into commercial work. A project like my Coca-Cola campaign in Mexico City is obviously commissioned photography, but I'm still interested in making the people feel connected to the actual city around them.

I don't want every commercial photograph to look like everyone stopped living for the photographer.

What I would do differently in New York today

If I went back to New York now, I don't think the biggest difference would be my camera.

I'd have a reason.

When I made these photographs, New York itself was enough.

New York was the subject.

Everything was new, so I just went looking for interesting photographs.

Today that's probably too broad for me.

I'd want to find something inside New York that I actually cared about and spend time on it.

A profession.

A community.

A group of people.

A weird subculture.

Some small part of the city I knew nothing about.

Something that made me return to the same place the next day instead of constantly moving on looking for another good photograph.

That's one of the biggest changes in how I think about street and documentary photography.

I used to be much more interested in collecting individual photographs.

Now I'm interested in what happens when the photographs start talking to each other.

Ten good photographs aren't automatically a project.

There has to be something between them.

That is one of the things I admire about Robert Frank. The individual photographs in The Americans matter, but the relationship between the pictures is a huge part of why the work matters.

If I returned to New York today, I wouldn't only want photographs of New York.

I'd want a reason to photograph New York.

But I would also try to know less

The funny thing is that I would go back with more intention, but I would also like to photograph with less thought.

That's the contradiction I see when I look at these old pictures.

Today I know more, but I also know how to hesitate.

I can look at something and dismiss it before I've even taken the picture.

Seven years ago I was more likely to just try.

So I don't really look at this work and wish somebody had taught me more.

Part of me wants to steal something back from the photographer I was then.

The closeness.

The wider lens.

The willingness to take a picture without completely understanding why.

You can figure out why afterwards.

Some of that instinct also became part of the way I make street portraits.

Sometimes I photograph somebody without interfering.

Sometimes I walk up and talk to them.

Sometimes I start by making a portrait, stay around for another minute and then something far more interesting happens when the "portrait" is supposedly finished.

There isn't one correct way to photograph people.

You just need to pay attention.

Looking at my early work now

These New York photographs are some of my earliest work, which is exactly why I wanted them in my photography portfolio.

They're not here because every frame is technically perfect.

They're here because I recognise myself in them.

The attraction to people.

Getting physically close.

Leaving some mess in the frame.

Reacting quickly.

Choosing character over perfection.

A lot of what I photograph now was already hiding somewhere in these pictures.

But I can also see things I've gradually moved away from.

28 mm.

Crowded frames.

More chaos.

More risk.

Less hesitation.

I want some of that back.

Maybe getting better isn't only about learning more.

At some point you also have to decide which things you've learned that you can safely forget.

Street photography inside commercial photography

Street photography still has a big influence on my commissioned work.

My approach to commercial street photography isn't about artificially making an advertisement look gritty.

It's about bringing some of the way I observe when I'm alone on the street into a bigger production.

Even if there is a brief, casting, production, art direction and a planned location, I'm still watching for what happens outside the plan.

A strange expression.

Someone looking away.

Two people doing something when they think we've stopped photographing.

Something happening in the background that nobody arranged.

Often those are the pictures I like.

That way of working has carried into larger campaigns including my Burger King photography and Coca-Cola work.

Obviously that's very different from walking around New York alone with a tiny Ricoh in your pocket.

But the basic instinct is surprisingly similar.

Get close enough.

Pay attention to people.

And don't be so obsessed with the photograph you planned that you miss the better one happening next to it.

Photography commissions in New York

I'm not based in New York.

I live in Copenhagen and work internationally, so I'm not flying into NYC to photograph a quick portrait for an hour.

But for the right commercial, advertising, editorial or documentary photography commission, absolutely.

I travel for larger projects when the budget and scope make sense.

New York would be particularly interesting for work where a brand, agency or publication wants something candid, documentary, black and white or connected to real street life rather than photography that feels overly constructed.

That could be a commercial campaign, documentary brand story, environmental portraits, lifestyle work, street casting or a project built around real people in New York.

Manhattan, Brooklyn or somewhere completely different isn't really the important part.

The subject is.

You can see more of my commercial photography work and my approach to commercial street photography.

If you're considering me for a larger project in New York, get in touch.

For the right commission, I'll fly in.

Going back to New York

I would like to photograph New York again.

Not because I want to recreate these pictures.

I don't.

And I'm definitely not interested in trying to photograph the version of New York I remember from seven years ago.

I'd rather see what catches my attention now.

I would probably arrive with more of an idea. Find something worth spending time on and see how far I could take it.

But I'd also bring a wider lens.

Get closer.

Take more chances.

And try not to think quite so much.

These photographs came from three days in New York with a Ricoh GR II and no real plan.

Seven years later, maybe what I like most about them is that I didn't know enough yet to talk myself out of taking them.