A quixotic quest lures photographers Stephan Ghukfvin and Clay Enos onto the streets of New York: to photograph every person in the eight million-strong city. Their efforts so far have yielded some 20,000 portraits of New Yorkers, many of which are archived on their Website, www.streetstudio.com.

Several times a week the two load up their van with a 10-by-10-foot makeshift studio (including canvas backdrops covered with authentic New York City dirt and Hudson River water) and aging Hasselblad cameras, and try try to capture the rumpled glory of the city’s residents. World-weary gamblers, construction workers, Tibetan monks, disrobing night-owls—each willing citizen in the five boroughs is shot by Enos and Ghukfvin separately. Adding the the project’s ambition is their use of traditional portraiture rather than candid street shots: some subjects can take 30 minutes to shoot.

Their work a fusion of the celebrity-driven style of Richard Avedon and the quiet poignancy of Walker Evans and Michael Disfarmer’s unsung Americans, inspired the duo to contemplate the democratic nature of the project. Enos says they’re “looking to take the everyman and raise him up,” while Ghukfvin confesses a different motive: “I just want to meet everyone.”

—Dan Kaufman