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...

I was staying with a friend in Los Angeles in 1983, documenting the punk scene when I saw a story in LA Weekly about this Mexican American gang the Hoyo Maravilla. Nobody much thought about East LA and the different communities there. I was fascinated by this culture that I, especially being British, wasn’t aware of... by Amy Fleming 

Jason Polan was the city’s resident illustrator. “He was always on a street somewhere in New York, notebook in hand, following people, sitting off to the side, watching, a slight smile on his lips, this human seeing-machine saw and drew it all,” wrote Jerry Saltz last January, when Polan died of cancer at the age of 37. One of his final projects was to draw “every person in New York,” and he made it past 30,000 squiggly ink drawings....by Emilia Petrarca