“What has united the vast, and diverse array of great talents who have made their work on New York city’s streets is an interest in uncovering and illuminating the peculiarities of their present moment, and doing so with whatever idiosyncratic strengths and sensitivities each individual photographer has been able to muster. The form they have given to that work brings with it a particular point of view, one that if effective can persuade us not only of the fact of what was depicted but of its necessary importance, its integrality to the particular historical moment of its expression. Straight photography has assumed this particular task in vastly differing forms for over a century, and the matter of our own particular present, of its plurality, its complexity, of its persistent threat of crisis and catastrophe, of its deep and ever widening divisions, can be made visible with stark clarity through the photographic act, even as the policies that govern that reality seem ever more blind to its nature.”

— from an essay on Paul Graham’s The Present, up here.

“34th Street_4th June 2010” © Paul Graham, from The Present