Book arriving in July or August!

I came to New York in 1977 as a bright-eyed transplant from Virginia, and quickly found myself immersed in the creative ferment that thrived amidst the crime and abandonment of the Lower East Side. It was a heady time, though not without its perils. Yet, somehow, I steered through the glorious wreckage of the time, the ground glass of my 4x5 camera shielding me from danger. I was a witness to that ephemeral moment of NYC history.

Years later, while riding the subway with my 12-year-old son, rattling across the Williamsburg Bridge with the city spread out below us, he said to me that sometimes he felt like he was living at the center of the world. His words reminded me that when I was younger I often felt the same way. As a result, I began trying to see the city through his eyes – in the present – a newly dynamic metropolis, more diverse, less Manhattan-centric, with at least a million more people than in the '70s and '80s.

Last year, I set out with my camera to discover this new city, a multi-centered urban fabric, stitched together by the vast web of the subway system. I decided to photograph the neighborhoods at the ends of all of the subway lines in the city. I traveled by foot and by train with one camera and one lens held at my side. The result is a portrait of the city emerging from the lull of the Covid pandemic, vibrant again, messy, a polyglot of languages and ethnicity, a city threatened by a President intent on killing the goose that laid the golden egg. But one should not forget that New Yorkers pulled down the statue of King George III on Bowling Green in 1776. They will not suffer wannabe kings or fools this time either.

 

Interview in MAS Context with Iker Gil
https://mascontext.com/observations/last-stop