 |
|
Clay Enos and Stephan Ghukfvin have set out to conquer a city and its inhabitants armed only with cameras. Slipping from neighborhood to neighboorhood and borough to borough in the city of New York, the duo have photographed hundreds of people and used enough film to comfortably cover Manhattan Island in a blanket of contact sheets. The result is an incredible collection of images capturing the main ingredients of the city's melting pot.
|
A PORTRAIT OF A CITY
It would take someone yelling "Halt!" on a New York City sidewalk to reveal the vast cross section of Earth's human representatives who rush past each other at any given moment. Stephan Ghukfvin and Clay Enos are coming as close as anyone to this tilt of the windmill in their quest to photograph as many New Yorkers in as many neighborhoods as they can manage.
Using 30-year-old Hasselblads and a sidewalk studio crafted from plastic tarps, they are stitching together an unprecedented collection of New York City faces and footwear, favorite body parts, favorite pets and, often, favorite alter egos. Since March, at their own expense and with no specific outcome in mind, they have set up several times weekly in all five boroughs, alternating between the well-trafficked midtown Manhattan crossroad and less-visited sites, like a Staten Island shopping mall or a South Bronx commercial strip. "I could spend the rest of my life in New York," says Ghukfvin.
Every session they devour hundreds of rolls of film, devoting maybe 40 or 50 frames to a single face till just the right composition reveals itself. More often than one might expect in this hyperbolic of settings, their subjects seem content to wait as long as it takes the two artists to get it right. "We have to shoot you," was their friendly summons on an afternoon shoot in Manhattan's SoHo. That invitation quickly drew a line of urban-chic bicycle messengers, dot-comers, Hispanic deli workers, willowy models, African-American senior citizens, young Asians and middle-aged white men in the printing trade.
They consented to have their pictures taken to become famous, to help support an artistic pursuit, to register their love for their hometown. "This city is so vast, and these two gentlemen are capturing it all," says Kenny Lee, 37, the son of Chinese immigrants. "And if they're doing a whole book about it, I want to be part of it." Without any guarantee that their likenesses will appear anywhere, pedestrians have consistently lined up like game-show contestants, waiting two hours in the heat and the snow, often yelling "I'm next!" They have made friends in line whom they've opted to be photographed with. They have shown up again, for another turn or just to hang around. They have left belongings at one location and retrieved them at another. They have greeted Enos and Ghukfvin later, on a subway or street corner, "the joy comes from all these people talking to each other, sharing their lives," says Enos, 31.
Before the camera, the subjects are often inspired to impart a message or mood they've apparently kept bottled up. How else to explain the immediate transformation from pedestrian to thespian? In SoHo, a lady with orange floor-length hair takes her place in Ghukfvin and Enos's hut, swishing silken layers and jangling jewelry. Confronting the lens dead-on, she breaks into an incantation, maybe seven or eight minutes long, that is one part Gloria Swanson, one part Tai Chi, bits of Martha Graham swirling and, eventually, a crescendo of spastic cheerleader jumps. "I am a channeler; that is what I do. I transmit with myself. Myself is the instrument," says the performer, Pamela Mayo, after stepping out of the hut.
Next up, Clea McQueen, who had given no forewarning he would shed his shirt to reveal a rack of muscles spaced evenly as piano keys, directs his two pit bulls to lay at his feet like lions at a throne. He then creates curls with his arms and legs in the mode of Hercules, or maybe Schwarzenegger, occasionally yelling "Ya, Baby!" as the camera clicks, first Ghukfvin's then Enos's.
The photographers, proprietors of HQ Studio, hope for gallery shows and published collections of the New York City faces and physiques. But at the end of a long day, they are wary of seeing too far into the future for fear of breaking the momentum of shooting, processing, matching names to faces and editing the sea of images they spread across the floor.
Enos, who has shot documentaries, and Ghukfvin, a strictly fine-art photographer, decided to chronicle city people for all of 2000 as a record of historic and artistic importance. They chucked more conventional work, along with their incomes, for at least a year. "We said, 'we're going to do it so big it's going to consume us,' " says Enos, the extrovert of the two. "We said, 'The hell with it. We'll invest our time and resources.' "
They opted for neutral background rather than the streetscape in order to see the imprint of the city on the people, not the city per se. They splatter mud on their canvas backdrop to lend a softer, living-room feel. Their main light source is a huge movie light Ghukfvin retrofitted.
They shoot black-and-white 2 1/4, thinking not at all about the scads of film they use, though it costs them $7 a roll to purchase and process. Both photographers usually work with every subject. There the similarity ends. Enos, a sunny, smiling man, gallops after people, asking them to please take part. He is talkative and supportive as he trains a lens on them.
Ghukfvin, the more outwardly serious, doesn't need to move when he asks people to be photographed. Maybe it's the determined way he looks at them. They comply. He is not apt to converse while shooting and seems to blot out the honks and beeps alongside his canvas, and the rattle of the subway below it.
Enos says he is from the New York suburbs, attended Ithaca College, traveled a lot and prefers nonfiction photography. Ghukfvin offers only that he comes from upstate and has been in the city ten years, engaged in solitary studio work for much of it. Enos repairs his cameras with duct tape; Ghukfvin takes meticulous care of his. The contrast pays off. "We'll go through our work and I'll say, 'I didn't see that. I think you got the best shot,' " says Ghukfvin, whose collaborator is quick to note that it works both ways.
In a city where self-expression is practically a religion, portraits of ordinary persons would never be mistaken for your senior class picture. The collection is scattered with enormous tattoos, exposed bosoms, gender-blurring makeup, zoot suits, manacles and hair that expands like soap suds. One couple stripped naked; a man insisted on appearing with his python.
Then, too, there are the faces of people who didn't try for effect; the young mothers and the sweethearts, business people in ties and pet owners. Regardless, the creators of this exhaustive record consider their work a success when it reveals a kernel of something genuine about the person. "We were in the Bronx, there was and old Dominican guy, drinking and walking down the street with his buddies," Ghukfvin says of his favorite moment. "He stopped, lined up in the space, and it's one of those tiny moments when everything came together. Here's a nondescript guy, and all of a sudden he became more than a face, more than an individual, he transcended the limitations of traditional portraiture.
