Manhattan 1

“My interest in these photographs begins with the realization that, in making them, Larry deliberately violated the rule of inattention. He presumed to make himself exceptional by looking at these people, most of whom are not looking back, at him or at anybody. These people have mostly accepted their anonymity and invisibility to one another.

The most poignant to me, of all these photographs is the one in which a man and a woman are brushing past each other, almost colliding, in a  crosswalk. This is another event without a story. Might the man have swayed over so as to touch the woman in passing? Are they aware of each other at all? But they could almost be performing an allemande in a square dance, looking ahead in opposite directions to their next partners.

There is nothing of voyeurism surely in looking openly at people who conventionally don’t care whether or not they are seen, and yet these photographs carry an insinuation of privacy revealed. Their intimacy is surprising and moving. These displays of human vulnerability, would not of themselves detain us as fellow passers in the street, but captured and held still in these photographs they stop us and draw from us a tenderness all the more poignant for its uselessness.”

—Wendell Berry, novelist, poet, essayist