Public Story
127th@StNick
127th@StNick
Radioscopy of a street corner, taken from my window in Harlem.I made this series of photos over several years, from a similar angle, the window of my 5th floor apartment in Harlem, New York. If it is on ongoing process, the extract that is posted on Visura was shot before the intense gentrification that has taken place in the neighborhood resulting in massive population displacementThis work shows the same street corner and its activities,127th Street and St Nicholas Terrace, at a time when underground economy and gun violence permeated the area. It is curated as a story board with photos closed-up in alternation.At the beginning, it was just a game consisting of stealing some street scenes. However, gradually, the game became a project and an almost clinical observation of an African-American neighborhood, symptom of a special economical context that has seen a rupture of the social progress and the increasing gap in wealth between white and black Americans.
The series questions the various layers of observation and control systems taking place in this neighborhood such as the one of the city through NYPD helicopters and surveillance cameras, the one of the dealers foot soldiers standing at this street corner, my own glance through the camera, the one of the viewer of this work and the wider question of the construction of the photographed subject.
Other aspects would be:
- Spatial configuration of emotions and architecture of tensions and conflicts in the urban space.
- Esthetics of ordinary situations.
- Problematic of the mechanisms of power.
- Mental and spatial kidnapping
- Stockholm syndrome.
Key words to define this series could be:
Thin line between casual observer and participant; visual ethnography; urban neighborhoods; urban poverty; surveillance society; urban planning; urban research; street culture; gangs; drug; underground economy web...
Radioscopy of a street corner, taken from my window in Harlem.I made this series of photos over several years, from a similar angle, the window of my 5th floor apartment in Harlem, New York. If it is on ongoing process, the extract that is posted on Visura was shot before the intense gentrification that has taken place in the neighborhood resulting in massive population displacementThis work shows the same street corner and its activities,127th Street and St Nicholas Terrace, at a time when underground economy and gun violence permeated the area. It is curated as a story board with photos closed-up in alternation.At the beginning, it was just a game consisting of stealing some street scenes. However, gradually, the game became a project and an almost clinical observation of an African-American neighborhood, symptom of a special economical context that has seen a rupture of the social progress and the increasing gap in wealth between white and black Americans.
The series questions the various layers of observation and control systems taking place in this neighborhood such as the one of the city through NYPD helicopters and surveillance cameras, the one of the dealers foot soldiers standing at this street corner, my own glance through the camera, the one of the viewer of this work and the wider question of the construction of the photographed subject.
Other aspects would be:
- Spatial configuration of emotions and architecture of tensions and conflicts in the urban space.
- Esthetics of ordinary situations.
- Problematic of the mechanisms of power.
- Mental and spatial kidnapping
- Stockholm syndrome.
Key words to define this series could be:
Thin line between casual observer and participant; visual ethnography; urban neighborhoods; urban poverty; surveillance society; urban planning; urban research; street culture; gangs; drug; underground economy web...
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