Press

Ari Marcopoulos is a self-taught photographer who was born in Amsterdam in 1957. In 1980 when he was 23, he moved to New York City and became a prominent photographer for hip-hop culture, skater culture, snowboard culture, and fashion. His recently released book, Polaroids 92-95 (CA) is one part of a two-part series documenting the skating scene during the early 1990s. One book takes place in New York and one in California, and while the New York book’s photographs were taken from a single skate park, the Brooklyn Banks, the CA version takes place in a multiple across the Californian...

Despite the quixotic scale of his work, Mr. Polan’s vision of New York wasn’t grandiose or especially nostalgic. He drew whoever caught his eye, and that didn’t depend on whether his subjects said in or on line, or if they ate their pizza with a fork. They were just people who happened to be in this particular place. (Crucially, he didn’t insist that people be “New Yorkers.” He allowed each person to be of this city, at least for a moment.) Most of his subjects were anonymous, but their anonymity wasn’t some step on the way to being discovered or transformed by attention. When...