At a time when hatred and fear are being celebrated in the highest places, and cities are vilified as particularly hellish, it was a wonderful balm to explore the exhibition "Dear New York," in Grand Central Station. The work of Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind Humans of New York, this exhibition replaces all the station's advertisements for two weeks with portraits and interview snippets. Most news images of the exhibition show the iconic central hall of Grand Central, but it's actually the least changed (except for being advert-free, I suppose).
Images from Stanton's work snake along the corridors connecting the
three levels of subways beneath the station, mixing with the people making their way to and from trains. Taking pictures of my own I was initially torn between waiting for people to pass so I'd get an uninterrupted view of Stanton's exhibition, and trying to stage the people hurrying obliviously by with it. Looking at my pictures now, the most satisfying are those in which you feel that the folks in his photos and in mine are the same, all New Yorkers with stories you may never know, but which work like Stanton's assures you are worth the knowing.
In Vanderbilt Hall,
there's new work from other photographers - profiles of the work of ten local
neighborhood photographers (one focusing on the homes of the formerly incarcerated), and surrounding them on three sides,
portraits by New York schoolchildren describing people "who have had an
impact" on their lives. Lots of cleverly posed mothers and fathers and siblings and
friends, grandparents, teachers, priests, neighbors...
