1440 Minutes New York City

PEYMAN AZHARI ist als Fotograf Autodidakt. Er legt seinen fotografischen Fokus auf die Reportagefotografie. Seine letzten Veröffentlichungen sind der Schwarz-Weiß-Bildband „1440 Minutes New York City“ und der Ausstellungskatalog „Addis Abeba – New York“ mit Mark Pepper. Beide Bücher sind im Verlag GHOST PRESS erschienen.

In a minute, New York City makes itself known. Its knowledge is transmitted as a feeling—a golden hunch that we are among our fellows, that we have found like-minded friends driven by passion. And passion is a liquid that ␣ows along the thoroughfares, seeps into the subway corridors, ␣lls the warehouses and delis, boardrooms and bars. It pumps through the veins of a community that believes in the immeasurable truth that Life Is Good. So as the sun rises and illuminates the skyscrapers, the eyes of New York City are not seduced by the magni␣cent cityscape—great hunks of manicured stone and girder sheared at incredible angles, pointed spires shooting into oblivion; instead, they see their brethren walking in the shadows. For the skyline is not New York; it is a dream, imagined and actualized. And within the unnamed faces that carom in and out of the city’s maze, there are collective visions of unlimited possibility—from bartender to banker, artist to architect—millions of cities within a city. This is PEYMAN AZHARI’S New York.

New York City rushes to nowhere—a massive splurge of humanity unified in the daily recklessness of 1440 minutes. A clown in full regalia rides a motorcycle down 32nd Street as if nothing could be more ordinary. A cabby blares her horn and delivers a dissertation on Chinese economics before cursing fluently in six languages. Joe the banker becomes Joanne after midnight—the starlet of the cabaret. The Metro cards are swiped and throngs of commuters push through the starting gates, bursting forth like liquored stallions to catch the trains. They dive into the darkness of the subway, politely but aggressively sidestepping until falling into cars and hurtling through tun- nels while they sip cups of coffee and check their hair in the reflective glass. These are details that veterans of the city have become immune to. But it is in these mo- ments that the universality of the day is revealed. In the time it takes for a lens to open and close, a tale is told in a single frame. DAVIS wears sunglasses and thump, thump, thumps on a drum he bought at a pawn shop in the East Village. He plays underneath a staircase, beside the heavy rattle of subterranean trains. And his audience comes and goes in harmony with arrival and departure times. He doesn’t care. He continues hammering out some untouch- able beat with his eyes closed, delivering the soundtrack of the subway that is his song, his dream. FREDERICK taps out the rhythm on a briefcase full of fake watches and sunglasses while he looks for gullible tourists on a train car, tabulating invisible profit sheets in his head, devising a way to get by. The train stops, the doors fling open, and FREDERICK is shot into Grand Central Station, and it’s humming with performers who bang on buckets, antique keyboards—anything that can be played.