Ghost Waltz, Volume I: Acquainted With The Night

Within my photography work, two of my main drivers are feelings of discovery and retrospection. New York City's architecture is full of layers of history. Rabid development continues to destroy historical buildings at an unprecedented rate. My current urban photography series Ghost Waltz was born from searching for New York City's past eras before they vanish. This series explores different neighborhoods and their singular atmospheres; Downtown’s gritty patrician buildings; Midtown’s unearthly heights; Uptown’s broad swathes of recognizable yet hidden historical elegance. With influences such as Brassaï, silent films and spirituality, I photograph the city in a manner that recalls modernist, early 20th-century photography. The view is familiar and otherworldly, as layers of the past come forward; the present recedes in an insubstantial instant. With Volume 1, I examine the overwhelming psychic effect of being inside “the belly of the beast” through the juxtaposition of shadows with light, movement with static, and silhouette with semblance. Shot on 35mm monochrome film. the grain reflects the grittiness of the urban landscape and the resulting existential crisis one may encounter in such a mystifying environment. Silhouettes walk towards city lights; lone figures whose alienation emphasizes the dissonance of city life as they walk amid historical structures whose decorative elements seem alien in a modern world built of cold glass and hard steel. Through this lens, I analyze the theory that human beings are in their essence living spirits — ephemera within the continuum of time and space. The title of Volume 1 is taken by a poem from Robert Frost, which best encapsulates the atmosphere of this work: “Acquainted with the Night

 I have been one acquainted with the night.
 I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
 I have outwalked the furthest city light.

 I have looked down the saddest city lane. 
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
 And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

 I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
 When far away an interrupted cry 
Came over houses from another street,

 But not to call me back or say good-bye;
 And further still at an unearthly height,
 One luminary clock against the sky

 Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
 I have been one acquainted with the night.”