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    Now reading: One young photographer’s love letter to NYC’s tourists

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    One young photographer’s love letter to NYC’s tourists

    We asked four rising photographers to lens Burberry’s iconic trench coat. 22-year-old Nolan Zangas took it on a sight-seeing trip around New York.

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    Nolan Zangas is a 22-year-old photographer based in New York City. He grew up just 40 minutes away, in Connecticut, and from a young age, he was captivated by the never-sleeping, something-on-every-corner excitement of the big city. It’s why, when we asked him to photograph Burberry’s iconic trench coat, he wanted to create a visual love letter to the Big Apple, the city he now calls home.

    Photographed on the Staten Island ferry — one of NYC’s most notorious “tourist traps” — Nolan’s images pay tribute to the joy found in seeing somewhere for the first time. Centred around a sight-seeing day out and set against the backdrop of Lady Liberty, the shoot captures the simple, naïve pleasure to be found in a day about town. The resulting series of cinematic images that could just as well be a humorous satire as a sincere celebration of the pictures we all take as bright-eyes tourists first arriving in the city. It’s something that feels especially prescient, given that lockdown has dwindled NYC’s tourism industry. For city dwellers like him — usually found complaining about tourists, instead of celebrating them — the less crowded Manhattan streets have allowed more time to look up and take it all in. “I’ve definitely been noticing things that I just took for granted before,” he says. “I’ll actually take the time to look at something that I see every day and appreciate the beauty of it. I think that’s definitely a motive behind this project.”

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    As a teenager in Connecticut, Nolan was an avid skateboarder and began making skate films with an old VHS camera, eventually pivoting to photographing his friends — and skating still informs his approach to documentary-style shots. “It teaches you a lot of persistence, because you’re constantly falling down and being like, OK, I’m going to keep trying until I’ve learned it,” he points out. “Even with photography, it just taught me to keep going and if I really enjoy something, I just need to keep doing and practice it, because skateboarding is all about practice.”

    Here, we caught up with Nolan to find more about how he’s bringing his unique perspective to image-making.  

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    Hi Nolan! What was behind your idea for this project?
    I got the idea, because I was at one of my friend’s houses in Midtown and I was mentioning going back home to my apartment in Brooklyn. He asked, ‘Do you ever take the ferry home?’ I didn’t know you could do that, I thought it was more of a sight-seeing activity. So, I ended up taking this ferry home and I was really inspired by it. I thought it was beautiful. I remember seeing a tourist on the ferry and thinking how funny that was. And then the next day after that, I was thinking of how I can turn the ferry into a shoot. And then I think a day or two after that, I got the email from you guys at i-D about doing a story with Burberry, and I thought it was just the perfect fit. My misinterpretation of the ferry only being for tourists and the beautify of it definitely sparked the idea.

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    What is it about New York City that you find so inspiring? 
    I don’t think it’s 100 per cent intentional, but I think when I lived in Connecticut, I was always getting a taste of the city because I would go over on the weekends and I remember thinking like how badly I wanted to live there and just not liking the more suburban quiet neighbourhood I grew up in. I think that has some correlation to it. I’m also just really inspired by the city because you can walk, and on every corner of the street, there’s something happening. A lot of my favourite photographers are street photographers from the 80s and 90s, and I really liked their photographs because they feel so exciting. They’re all about just finding the moment as opposed to creating it, because there are always things happening around you. You just have to pay attention.

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    Do you think the role of a photographer is more important now than ever before, given we’re living a time saturated by so many images?
    I wouldn’t say the role in a photographer is more important now, but the value of photography has definitely changed. It’s hard for me to say because I’ve grown up in the era of social media, but nowadays we are constantly seeing hundreds and hundreds of images a day, and it’s sad to say but I believe this lowers the value of a photographer. Everyone has a camera on their cell phone now, and that gives everyone the ability to easily take a photograph. A photographer should have intention behind the image and must being doing something in order to stand out from all the noise.

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    I think that that’s what makes a new generation of photographers really interesting, that innate understanding to the power of photography. 
    Photographers now are able to have their work seen by anyone anywhere, and that gives them a new kind of power in the industry. I’m interested in the idea that a photograph is one of the only ways you can kind of see what another person is seeing or understand what their mind’s like visually, because you can look at someone’s artwork, or someone’s painting and that’s more of a representation of their thoughts or what they’re seeing, but a photograph is an actual choice, as in ‘I want to take this picture right here, right now’. So, it’s really intriguing to me that you can almost see through someone’s eyes by looking at their photograph and try understanding why they made that choice. Maybe you agree with it, maybe you don’t. Maybe I wouldn’t have seen it that way. Maybe I would have waited a second or two. 

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    What would you say, kind of defines your approach to photography? And what is it that you’re interested in conveying in your pictures?
    I really enjoy photographing my friends and, and it’s kind of like a documentary approach to photography — a documentation of my friends and my surroundings, but with a more cinematic approach to it. A lot of street photographs, the subject seems like they’re surprised or they’re almost scared in a way by the camera, but when you’re taking portraits of your friend, it’s more of an intimate feeling of comfort or it’s more of themselves and you can feel it through the images. Which is different to walking by and snapping that person — that can be very aggressive and invasive. I like the idea of capturing the moment or a candid moment of something, but I don’t love the idea of jumping into people’s faces and intruding on their life. I want my images to feel more personal and intimate. 


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