The Crash

This started as an assignment in a class taught by photographer Charles Harbutt: go out and look at the world like an alien. Try to see something commonplace through new eyes, or go somewhere unfamiliar and treat it as such. I chose Wall Street, where I had spent very little time, and began going at sunrise, usually between five and six in the morning.

I was learning how to photograph and trying to become confident doing it. At the time I had fallen in love with reportage and documentary photography from the 1930s through the 1960s, and I was fascinated by the question of whether I could do that myself. So I repeated the process: see something worth photographing, take out the camera, get over the social embarrassment, and make the photograph until it became second nature.

The photograph of a man's hands behind his back, with a cab at the right, was a breakthrough. I was using a wide lens, probably 28mm. To crop it tightly I had to hunch down very close behind him and take the picture while other people looked at me. When I developed it, it was exactly what I had hoped: the exposure, focus, and frame were right. I had seen the image, put myself through the discomfort, and made it.

After enough mornings, I was also allowing the place to speak to me. I began to see finance as labor, and a private, cloistered world around it. I did not want a villainous portrait. I was interested in the culture that makes financial abuses possible and normal: alienation from the impact of the work, deference to authority, social goals of wealth and posture. The connection to the 2008 crash is retrospective in that sense; it is not a cause-and-effect account of one event.

I shot Tri-X on an Olympus OM-1 my dad gave me, rolled and developed the film, and printed the photographs myself. I sequenced them as if for an exhibition or book. The series helped me get work, but for me it remains a kind of private talisman.