Vertical New York
by John Gellings
Robert Capa once said: “If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough.”
I took his quote as a challenge to see if I could make photographs from far away (both in proximity and intimacy) and still make compelling photographs. Since I was living in New York City (Manhattan specifically) at the time, I had the perfect backdrop due to what I view as the verticality of NYC.
Space and spaciousness but vertically speaking within continuous layers of buildings. Manhattan is only 13.4 miles (21.6 km) long and 2.3 miles (3.7 km) wide (at its widest), but it packs a lot into that space due to the number of larger and/or tall buildings. Around 1.6 million people live in that space and Manhattan is one of most densely populated areas in the world, with an estimated population of 73,000 residents per square mile (or 28,154/km2), higher than the density of any individual U.S. city. It has the third-largest population of New York City's five boroughs, after Brooklyn and Queens, but is also the smallest borough in terms of land area.
Walking is also important in NYC and the City is the epitome of the word pedestrian. People who otherwise do not walk in their daily lives travel to NYC and walk the streets. There is something poetic about walking the streets of NYC. There is also anonymity and loneliness to walking the streets. Millions of people walking around, but still, for the average person, anonymity. I try to convey that in my photographs as well.
It should be noted that the use of vertical framing was another challenge. A few of my friends that I photographed with said they hated it and considered it ugly. In my stubborn head, that meant that vertical framing is exactly what I needed to use in my photography. What started out as a personal challenge ended up being my preferred way of framing and also served a purpose in this project. The verticality of the city shown in the vertical frame. A perfect fit.
Lastly, while I do not specifically do Architecture Photography, my photos do use some of the language and methods of Architecture Photography. I would say that my photography is a convergence between street photography and architecture photography while not completely conforming to the style of either.
While the two “challenges” that led to this body of work are simple, and not overly intellectual, both were integral to my development and were personally important to my way of seeing in photography. When people say you should not do something in photography, I think it is worth exploring if it is true or not. It could lead to personal discovery. Of course, Robert Capa was right as well… so I never abandoned his philosophy completely. If I need to be closer, I get closer. Still, the general spirit of these challenges and my attempt to meet the challenges, I believe, are conveyed within these photographs.
I was born in New Jersey, USA and I started photographing at age 17. I had always been interested in art throughout my primary and secondary school days, but it wasn’t until bought a Pentax K1000 with my graduation money that I found my medium. Still, it was mostly learning the basics without any direction or influences. I was learning technical concerns, but not conceptual matters. However, the first time I viewed the book “William Eggleston’s Guide” in the mid-1990s, I was truly hooked on photography. I switched from B&W to color photography immediately and started focusing on the ordinary everyday elements of life or, as some call it, the banal. The book was an epiphany to me and it is still influential in my photography today. Once I moved to New York City as an adult I found my content, like many others, on the streets. I lived and photographed in NYC until 2017. Since then, I have been living and photographing in Santiago, Chile. A new city with new content to photograph. I graduated from Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University, New Jersey) with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography in 1998.
Influences: William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, William Klein, Saul Leiter, Sergio Larraín, Alex Webb, Gerry Johansson and the large format photography of Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz.