The city of Miami is equally pretty and gritty. Vintage neon hotel signs contrast with the Wynwood cascade of graffiti over chain-link and vacant lots. Ads for luxury towers bump up against rent-by-the-week hotels. Garish greens and reds compete in shop windows that tout signs for TATTOOS and BUDWEISER. Bass-heavy music booms from pickups in the constant cool breeze.
It is all too much, and this excess is its visual fuel. Everything is too tall, too big, too amped-up. Miami is all surf style, a way of being that exposes the underbelly of America thumping along beneath the top 1%.
The sun hits hard and bright on the pastel hotels and lush palm trees in South Beach. Tucked away are the security cameras and spiked fences that suggest an undercurrent of despair.
Meanwhile everything reflects everything else: tinted sunglasses, shop windows, souvenir trinkets and saturated sunsets. It’s a hall of mirrors that’s easy to get lost in, all basking under that vast azure sky.
The city of Miami is equally pretty and gritty. Vintage neon hotel signs contrast with the Wynwood cascade of graffiti over chain-link and vacant lots. Ads for luxury towers bump up against rent-by-the-week hotels. Garish greens and reds compete in shop windows that tout signs for TATTOOS and BUDWEISER. Bass-heavy music booms from pickups in the constant cool breeze.
It is all too much, and this excess is its visual fuel. Everything is too tall, too big, too amped-up. Miami is all surf style, a way of being that exposes the underbelly of America thumping along beneath the top 1%.
Click here to buy a 30-page book of “SURF STYLE” photographs.
Here is an up-close and personal look at the French Quarter in New Orleans, its gritty decay and alluring neon, its losers and players, its many-layered veils of shop windows and saturated pastels.
A place where public and private meld in unexpected ways and anything goes.
Here is an up-close and personal look at Charleston, SC, reflecting its chichi shops, foodie dens, and multimillion mansions along the Battery, as well as its history of racial turmoil.
Known as the Queen City for 250 years, Charleston is a crazy quilt of high and low, from Red Moon Margaritas in rooftop bars to Gullah women weaving baskets with sweetgrass on sidewalks.
While over everything arches a porcelain-blue sky broken up by dramatic arcs of palm trees.
In Reykjavik, the streets look like scale models of streets, the houses brightly colored with aluminum cladding and shaped like a child’s drawing of a house. Nothing is out of place.
Even the street signs are crayon-colored in blue and red and yellow.
Look more closely, though, and you can spot security cameras angled from eaves. There is an ominous feeling to such perfection, such peacefulness. One begins to long for a swath of graffiti to deface a sunny wall.
In St. Petersburg, the grand buildings along Nevsky Prospekt—the palaces, cathedrals and department stores—are strung together overhead by a dizzying network of electrical and phone cables. Reflections in shop windows catch glimpses of lime and tangerine signs, official-looking seals and a field of daisies.
This is the street celebrated by Gogol and Dostoevsky, and where the cafe still exists where 19th-century luminaries gathered. The images present a jigsaw version of the thoroughfare, piecing together historical echoes and vibrant street life.
Just like the movie, Chinatown may be a state of mind, which reveals itself in fragments of torn posters, curls of neon and glimpses of hidden doorways. Red is sprayed across every surface, vibrating against the vivid blue sky at dusk.
