dear new york
‘Dear New York’ was a street art project I developed for Gene Coleman, a photographer based in New York City.
I met Gene back in 2014, and after discovering that he had been photographying New York since the late 1960s, helped him to digitize signficant portion of his 30+ year career. I also designed and coded a website for him, along making an accompanying video.
Dear New York was made in the winter of 2015, when we teamed up to develop a street art campaign that commented on the rapid development and gentrfication of New York City.
I digitised over a thousand of his photographs over the course of two years.
I also shot a brief introductory montage of his work for his website.
“Dear New York is my small protest against the epidemic of overbuilding, destroying mom and pop stores, and the daily erosion of the human scale and community of New York we used to know and love. These street photographs were taken in the 70s and 80s. They letters are more recently written laments. In those days, I was excited to get my camera and hit the streets, when I had time off from my studio photography that helped fund my passion. Every block, every street offered hope of seeing something exciting, and it was all a total adventure of being an urban explorer.”
- Gene Coleman
