Independent photographic series · 2007–2019
MY NYC
in Color
A photographic time capsule of New York.
View the complete archive
The project
New York, vivid and unmistakably human.
For more than a decade, I photographed New York as I encountered it: vivid, unguarded, strange, beautiful, and unmistakably human.
Created between 2007 and 2019, MY NYC in Color is an extensive body of street photography documenting the people, architecture, rituals, contradictions, and fleeting moments that gave the city its character.
New York was both my subject and my lived environment. I knew its rhythms intimately, but the camera encouraged me to keep looking at it with curiosity. The work lives in that tension between familiarity and discovery.
Finding the extraordinary in ordinary life
Walking, watching, and recognizing the instant.
The photographs were not staged or constructed. They emerged from walking, watching, and recognizing the instant when color, light, gesture, environment, and human behavior briefly formed a complete story.
Some images are cinematic. Others are funny, tender, lonely, eccentric, or quietly surreal. Together, they preserve the small dramas unfolding throughout the city every day: a private expression on a crowded street, an accidental relationship between a person and an advertisement, or a moment of beauty that existed for only a fraction of a second.
Color became both a compositional tool and a way of understanding New York. It reveals connections between people and their surroundings, introduces tension, and transforms ordinary street scenes into something more emotionally charged.
A human archive
A record of human attention.
The series began at the threshold of the smartphone era and continued as technology gradually changed how people experienced public space.
It now carries another significance. Every photograph was created before generative AI transformed the production and perception of imagery. The people, expressions, shadows, reflections, and strange coincidences within these photographs existed in the physical world. They were observed rather than prompted.
MY NYC in Color preserves a period when street photography depended upon presence, patience, instinct, and the willingness to remain open to whatever the city offered.
It is both a portrait of New York and a record of human attention.
Window Gazing
A quiet meditation on aspiration, identity, and aging.
One of the series’ most recognized photographs, Window Gazing, captures an older man standing before a Brooks Brothers display, his trench coat and briefcase echoing the subdued palette and formal clothing arranged behind the glass.
For a moment, the observer appears almost to belong within the display. The relationship between the man, the mannequins, and the clothing creates a quiet meditation on aspiration, identity, aging, and the ways we imagine ourselves through what we see.
The photograph received an award and was exhibited at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center.
Recognition and archive
The complete collection, preserved as a dedicated digital archive.
Selections from MY NYC in Color have appeared in independent photography and arts publications. The work has also received juried recognition and gallery exhibition through the Colorado Photographic Arts Center.
I conceived, curated, designed, and built the archive to preserve the scale and visual character of the work.
Visit MYNYCinColor.comFuture vision
One unrepeatable moment at a time.
My long-term vision is to develop the collection into a photography book: a physical record of New York during a period of profound cultural and technological change, seen through the details that made the city feel alive.
The project remains an important part of my creative identity. Long before I began designing AI-enabled products and creative systems, photography taught me how to observe closely, compose instinctively, recognize emotional truth, and tell a complete story within a single frame.