A Language of New York

A photographic meditation on what it means to be a New Yorker: an identity that shifts as constantly and as rapidly as the city itself

In 1995, renowned American photographer Mitch Epstein (born 1952) began making pictures in New York City as it underwent a seismic cultural and physical shift. The gritty neighborhoods and sassy unselfconsciousness of the 1970s, when Epstein had first moved to New York, were disappearing. Signs of the future were encroaching: surveillance cameras, the normalization of gun violence as a virtual reality game in Times Square and Disney’s gentrification of the old theaters and strip clubs on 42nd Street. As a seasoned documentarian of the American landscape and psyche, Epstein set out to photograph the streets and public spaces of New York in this strange liminal space, between past and future. A year into the project, he also began making black-and-white portraits of his inner circle in their homes or workspaces as an intimate counterpoint to his color photographs of street life. A Language of New York examines the city’s recurrent self-cannibalizing into a new upcycled landscape and the urban relationship between public and private. Both gimlet-eyed inquiry and loving homage, it describes an incredibly resilient city prone to cooperation, protest, consumerism and creativity in the extremes.