This is a selection of photographs from my on-going series titled "Repose" which has been a personal project in process for 25 years and counting. I began this collection of street photos in New York City when I was compelled to photograph a couple of guys sleeping on the stone benches outside the main public library on 42nd Street. Since then, I have never been able to pass a subject without adding to this collection. Whether I was on a personal outing or in the middle of a professional shoot, I would stop and take a photo of anyone sleeping on a bench or something similar. This concept initially pulled me in viscerally, driven by a feeling and a commitment I didn't fully understand, like a poem whose meaning you just feel, or an abstract painting. I left myself open to this intuitive process, as I do with all my personal work.
An aspect of this project which strikes me as clearly understandable is that it is content drive, not aesthetically predetermined. What I mean is that there is a power to these images which comes from the elements of that moment, the background, the milieu, the society, and the individual photographed, all telling a story in a place and time. My intuitive eye is of course, also at work aesthetically, sensing the proper framing and lighting, but overall it guides me to capture an elemental moment that includes a reflection and sometimes commentary on our society and universal state of being when an individual stops in time in their moment of repose.
New York City 1989
