Steidlville

This book presents a selection of street portraits taken in New York City since the early 1970s by Jerry Thompson. Beginning in Coney Island in 1972 and ending in Times Square in 2006, the book encompasses three and a half decades of Thompson’s encounters with people on the streets of New York. Thompson has combined the photographs with quotations, each pertaining to the subject, from sources as diverse as Shakespeare and Stendhal, Aristotle and Heidegger, Walker Evans and Lincoln Kirstein. They suggest a conversation intended to concentrate the viewer’s attention, stimulate her thinking, and expand his curiosity about what it is that pictures – and the act of looking at pictures – might be capable of accomplishing.