Ingesting 14 goldfish nearly killed Buddy as a teenager. At a funfair once upon a time, Buddy’s friends had him swallow every goldfish they won in a shlook of their water. The next day he felt unwell. The live fish had poisoned him and he had to have his stomach pumped. Now a building caretaker living in New York, Buddy only drinks Gatorade, Jack Daniel’s, and Coke. He has a fascination with death. His body and apartment are festooned with mortality mementoes, and he occasionally sleeps in a coffin. We know this story because he is one of a handful of subjects Anya Broido has captured for her latest project. Her brief from Contact Gallery was simple: take pictures of people. But how does one take interesting street photos in a forensically documented city?
Born in Israel, Anya grew up in London and moved to New York in May last year. During lockdown in the UK, she tended to vulnerable people, getting the job after telling her interviewer about time spent photographing people in London’s Soho, where she would sometimes end up helping people into ambulances. Anya had long yearned to move to NYC and photograph the iconic street scenes she had seen in films like Taxi Driver, but once she arrived, like so many people wanting to stay, she encountered visa issues. Her tactic was to approach strangers at gallery openings, go for coffee and ask them to sponsor her — it worked, and she soon acquired a temporary art visa.
A fresh challenge entered her life at the same time a relationship ended. The brief from Contact Gallery offered her an opportunity to explore the identity of her new city while navigating heartbreak. In the heat of July and August, she rode the subway in search of subjects. She would tell those she encountered about her love drama, and in turn they would reveal their own story. “It was the most intense month of my life,” she says. “I would approach strangers, get to know them and try to find the different types of New York. Photography is like a secret weapon that you can use to be in any situation, and it doesn’t seem like you’re weird for being there.”
The result is a delicate series of portraits of individuals from different areas, each with a story sensitivity retold. Every person helped her sketch a contour in what she calls her “cultural map” of the city. Not being a local was no problem. Photographers are often fringe figures, like Diane Arbus, she muses, or Vivian Maier, the elusive nanny who meticulously captured city life without ever publishing her own images. “I definitely feel like an outsider type. A lot of street photographers feel like that. It’s the reason they got into it and part of their nature.”
Anya found approaching people tougher in New York than other cities she’d shot in, namely Tel Aviv and London, noting that people often protect themselves by closing themselves off. “The access is harder; everyone’s so busy. To peel back the layers takes so much more trust. I used to be much more candid, and I found I wanted to get closer in.”
Once, at 2AM, Anya was shuttling along the subway L Line through Bushwick when she noticed someone drawing in a notebook. Msfenyx had been rejected by her community in New Orleans as she was transitioning, so she sought refuge in New York. “Everyone’s got a story here, which was very humbling,” she says. Another time, on Coney Island, she met Clelia. As Anya photographed her, the veiled Italian woman danced in the sea under the sun, moving like a mother from a Fellini film, unspooling her past to Anya.
Unlike many street photographers, Anya has opted for a chunky medium format Pentax 67 for most of this project. “Most people would say not to use that; it’s not a fast tool,” she laughs. But she finds the results too beautiful to miss out on, bringing a distinctive sense of the “vernacular” — the language of New Yorkers. Using this camera, she drapes her acquaintances in chiaroscuro, many appearing like urban madonnas.
In one particularly striking photo, Adelaide, a 92-year-old Argentinian dressmaker, peers out from the shadows with a gimlet eye aglow with theatre. She’s no exception to the rule that everyone has a story to tell, hers being that she’s a survivor of a murder attempt from her former husband. Anya met Adelaide while she was sitting on some steps in the East Village. “I wanted to capture this sense of drama because every time she tells stories, her eyes widen.”
The full series ‘14 Portraits of NYC’ by Anya Broido can be viewed here
Credits
All images courtesy Anya Broido