Modeling Series

I think of myself as primarily a street photographer, first inspired by the work of Vivian Maier and maintaining a rather strict notion of what that means.

Early one summer’s evening I went exploring down a neighborhood street, and an exciting scene presented itself that I hadn’t seen before at that same wall (which I had previously captured for its minimalism, now included in my Shapes and Overlooked galleries).  Groups of people began arriving at this place, mostly 20-something women and their friends, primarily from Asia.  They acted independently of each other, and groups would come and go.

As I was capturing what was happening before my eyes, I noticed that not only were the people intriguing in the ways that they did and did not interact with each other, but I came to see their shadows take on lives of their own, interacting sometimes with their people counterparts and sometimes only with other shadows.  Over time, I was just as intrigued by the shadow people as I was by the human people.

I came back on several occasions, though not nearly as often as I should have, and I saw that the phenomenon of people coming to this place for selfies and photos with friends had exploded.  Such images went viral, and the phenomenon still continues though significantly reduced since the advent of the Covid era.

In my photos, the color of the wall may change from one image to the next, depending on the light, weather, and time of day when it was taken.  For the sake of photographic candidness, I chose not to color correct and make them all look the same. Rather, these color changes came to convey an aliveness and another character in the whole scene, which may change daily and from moment to moment.

This wall is now internationally known and is touted as the second most photographed wall in the world, behind The Great Wall of China, and typically referred to as The Pink Wall.

These photographs are not presented to contextualize or document the current phenomenon but to portray the life I saw happening there as pure street, populated by people, shadows, and light, alive and interacting among themselves and with each other, and with the aesthetic qualities of fine art, not the vernacular of social media snapshots.

All are candid images, presented without Photoshop compositing.