Streets of New York — Faces and Gestures in the City’s Shadows

Streets of New York — On the Streets of New York

I watched people and framed them, over and over again. The gestures and expressions that photographer Yoon Jeongvin encountered on the streets of New York come vividly alive in the shades and shadows of the city.

Words & Photos Yoon Jeongvin

Before turning to the story of the Algerian city of Oran in his novel ‘The Plague,’ Albert Camus says: “A convenient way of getting to know a town is to find out how people in it work, how they love, and how they die.”

To get to know a city, I watch people in shops, at stations, at crosswalks, and in parks. When I photographed the streets of New York, too, I tried to capture in my pictures exactly what I felt from the countless people passing by from moment to moment, whether tourists or locals, I couldn’t tell.

Everyone travels differently. Out of habit, I would pick a starting point in the morning and take street photographs. I set out early each day but made no particular plans. Once I had chosen a starting point, I simply walked wherever I felt like going. Walking in a daze, I discovered that New York’s Chinatown is very large and, surprisingly, close to Wall Street. I can’t count how many times I went back to Chinatown alone. It wasn’t that I had made up my mind not to return to the same place, either.

I remember that on Thanksgiving, after a feast of turkey and plenty of beer at the guesthouse, I woke up the next dawn still half drunk and, just as I had the day before, took the subway without a thought to some street in New York to take photographs. That is how powerful habit is.

Perhaps because I spent whole days wandering around eating nothing but street pizza and salad boxes, I weighed myself after returning from New York and found I had lost several kilograms. Having roamed the streets so thoroughly, I could look at a map and pinpoint exactly where a photo was taken, without even using GPS.

The weather in New York in November 2019 was changeable. A single shirt was enough during the day, but it turned quite cold once the sun went down or the wind and rain came in. On top of that, perhaps because New York has heating systems underground, steam of unknown origin rose from here and there through the cold air. Just walking around and seeing in person the scenes I had seen countless times in films and photographs thrilled me, and that excitement never settled until the day I left New York.