Finding quiet in a city that never really stops

New York is loud.
That is hardly breaking news.
Cars lean on their horns as if it might somehow improve traffic. Sirens bounce between buildings. People talk, shout, laugh, argue, rush past you. Somewhere underneath it all, the subway adds its own metallic soundtrack.
The city seems to have decided that silence is suspicious.
And yet, when I started going through my photographs afterwards, I noticed something slightly strange.
The images I kept returning to weren’t necessarily the loud ones.
They were the pauses.

Waiting for nothing in particular

When I walk around with a camera, I rarely have a shopping list of photographs in my head.
I’m not looking for a yellow cab here, a skyscraper there, perhaps someone carrying a coffee for extra New York points.
I just walk.
And look.
Sometimes probably a little too much.
Street photography, at least the way I enjoy it, is mostly about noticing when all the moving pieces briefly fall into place.
Someone waiting at a crossing.
A person disappearing around a corner.
Light hitting a face for half a second before the city swallows it again.
A figure standing still while hundreds of others seem to flow around them.
Tiny scenes with no beginning and no ending.
And no idea that someone is photographing them.

The quieter New York

New York has been photographed approximately seventeen billion times.
I may be slightly off with that number.
So there is something wonderfully pointless about arriving with a camera and thinking you are going to show the world what New York looks like.
We already know.
We know the skyline. The yellow cabs. Times Square. The bridges. The signs. The steam rising from the streets.
What interests me more is what happens around all those things.
The person nobody else is looking at.
The strange little geometry that appears between two buildings.
A shadow.
A reflection.
Someone alone in a crowd.
Nothing spectacular.
Which is probably exactly why I notice it.

Letting the city do the work

I think I used to chase photographs more.
Find the angle. Find the subject. Move around. Make something happen.
These days I’m becoming increasingly fond of simply putting myself somewhere interesting and waiting.
New York is particularly good at rewarding that kind of laziness.
Stay in one place for long enough and eventually the city rearranges itself in front of you.
Someone enters the frame.
Someone leaves.
The light changes.
A moment exists for a fraction of a second and then collapses again.
That little fraction is often the photograph.
Of course, most of the time absolutely nothing happens and you are simply a middle-aged man standing on a pavement with a camera.
Photography keeps the ego nicely polished.

Why black and white?

A lot of the photographs in The Space Between Sirens ended up in black and white.
Not because New York lacks colour. Quite the opposite.
There is colour everywhere.
Perhaps sometimes too much of it.
Removing it helped me see what had actually caught my attention in the first place: the light, the people, the shapes, the distance between things.
Suddenly a photograph wasn’t about a red sign or a yellow jacket.
It became about the person underneath it.
Black and white can do that.
It clears the table a little.

The space between sirens

The title came from the feeling I had when looking through the finished series.
Because somewhere between the horns, the footsteps, the voices and the next siren tearing down an avenue, there are these tiny pauses.
They may only last a second.
Nobody announces them.
Most people probably never notice them.
But they are there.
And perhaps that is what I enjoy most about photography.
It gives me an excuse to notice.
To stop in a city that refuses to.
To look at something completely ordinary for just a little longer than necessary.
And every once in a while, bring a small piece of that moment home.

See all the New York images in the gallery