Back in the summer of 2010, a 13-year-old Sara Messinger arrived in New York to visit her aunt and immediately felt at home amidst the whirl of eight million people going about their daily lives. While her aunt was at work, Sara hopped on a train to visit the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Natural History, and Washington Square Park — taking in the splashy sights with the eyes of a pre-teen yearning for a bigger and better world. “I remember feeling like, this is my favourite place in the world,” Sara says. “New York encourages you to be yourself.”
Growing up in suburban Philadelphia and New Jersey, Sara never felt like she fit into the narrow confines of bourgeois social codes. An athlete on the soccer field, she was recruited out of high school and moved to Washington, D.C., only to feel out of place once again. “In my heart, I knew I wanted to move to New York,” she says. “So I quit soccer, which was the scariest thing I ever did.”
Sara arrived in New York in 2019 to study at NYU and found herself walking through the Village once more, people-watching for hours on end. She was happy, but something was missing. That something was photography, which she happened across during a study abroad travel writing class in Cuba in January 2020. Encouraged to document her experiences in both photography and text, Sara picked up a camera and hit the streets, walking ten miles a day.
Photography stilled her mind and honed her eye, and, in that moment, she became fully present. “Walking around with my camera was like a meditation,” Sara says. “I never felt I was able to express myself through words because I was so shy. The idea of being able to express myself through an artistic form was unfathomable to me. I heard of people doing it, and I appreciated art, but like, I never knew that I could be an artist.”
With the camera as her compass, Sara returned to New York and embarked on a path of discovery that would take her to Tompkins Square Park in the East Village one hot summer day in June 2021. “I saw this group of three giggling teens skipping towards me, and they looked like they had just walked out of a movie,” Sara says. “The way they dress and carry themselves? They looked like they were from another decade.”
Intrigued, Sara introduced herself and asked to make a portrait. “They were super excited and got into position.” Sara got the shot and took their names. The kids became the centrepiece of her ongoing documentary project, Teenagers. With Mary Ellen Mark’s Streetwise as the blueprint, Sara stepped inside a group of New York teens who gravitated to what remained of the city’s fabled East Village fringe.
After reconnecting with them months later, Sara began spending more time with them, getting to know how they moved through life and finding inspiration in their uniquely New York drive to claim their space — everything her suburban upbringing sought to silence. “They are open, accepting and unapologetic,” says Sara. “They care about being their true selves and displaying that through how they look or how they act.”
Although she was born in 1998, Sara sees a distinction between elder and younger Gen Z kids, particularly in their comfort and respect around gender. “When I was in high school, there was one trans student, and I remember people whispering about them. Now kids share their pronouns, and everybody’s cool. No questions asked, no gossiping. That’s amazing to me to have the support of your friends.”
Like Bruce Davidson, who photographed Brooklyn Gang back in 1959, Sara is interested in the moments of revelation, solace, and release, wordlessly sharing the intimate truths of the human condition in today’s youth. Her portraits of Gen Z kids who call New York streets their playground offer a look at the latest generation of artists, rebels, and bohemians drawn to the East Village’s reputation for creativity and freedom.
Shaped by her own internal quest for selfhood, connection, and community, Sara’s photographs express these conditions as they unfold in those quiet moments of everyday life that later become our fondest memories of time shared together. “As you get older, everybody has these walls up and are trying to carry themselves as very much professional, whatever that means. It’s all ‘I do this. I live here. This is my life. Don’t question me’.”
“With the kids, there’s something beautiful and honest about the way they can show their emotions in an open space. Photography is a form of self-reflection, and these pictures show what I was feeling at the time. There’s a picture of a couple with curly hair, and it’s like they’ve morphed into one person. It’s a photo of love and care, from the deepest part of my heart that I would never be able to express in words.”
Credits
All images courtesy Sarah Messinger