Two photographers map a city by its people.
A tourist in New York’s Washington Square Park might sit to watch passersby. Within two minutes, he might see a breezy Nordic princess, a trio of suits, a long-lashed Latina pushing a stroller, and a frenzied park regular in a wedding dress and fruit/flower/polar-bear headpiece. He might have a single exposure left and sigh with indecision—choosing one typical shot for the folks back home ain’t easy. If photographers Clay Enos and Stephan Ghukfvin were around, they’d hand him another roll of film.
The two comprise a graphic arts and photography partnership called HQ Studio, and together they are in the midst of documenting the city’s urban landscape through its many faces, capturing as many images of the typical city dwellers as they can in a project called New York 000.
More than 70 years after August Sander strove to archive all classes of german citizens in his monumental “Man in the Twentieth Century” series, catching in his quite prescient lens the historical moment between World Wars, Enos and Ghukfvin have taken on a theoretically narrower but still dizzyingly ambitious mission: to capture New Yorkers passing the threshold of the 21st.
Like Sander, Enos and Ghukfvin are motivated by the desire to encapsulate the spirit of a place through the expressions that distinguish and unite neighborhoods, classes, and generations. But it is not as straightforward as it sounds. Is it even possible to represent a city like New York at the turn of the century without also getting caught in its politics? Its dropping the ball, its mayor, its police force, its museum exhibitions, and its elections?
Like Diane Arbus’s photographs from the 1950s and ‘60s, the New York 000 portraits are intense, straight-gazing black and white. But, unlike Arbus, Enos and Ghukfvin have opted to strip their subjects of context, placing them before a plain backdrop. The technique may be nothing new, but the effect is an unadulterated, singular story in each portrait.
From the angelic hippie couple at the Astor Place subway station to the drag-party celebrant naked but for a banana costume, the subjects introduce themselves with forced clarity. So far, Enos and Ghukfvin have plucked characters from the Roseland Ballroom, the sidewalks of lower Fifth Avenue, and the corners of Williamsburg. Before the year is out—and the intended 10,000 portraits are taken and bound in book form—they hope to hit bingo night, off-track-betting centers, Wall Street, Brooklyn hair salons, subway cars, and of course, the Coney Island Mermaid Festival. “Some people aren’t so willing to have their portraits taken, “ Enos rues. “I suppose it’s a matter of our cultural litigiousness or of a questioning the trustworthiness of strangers. Thankfully, others are very happy to share themselves.” The mermaids? “Oh,” grins Enos, nodding slightly, “I hope they’ll be willing.”
MAKING FACES