Life Cycles: Birth, Growth, and “The Orphaned Anythings”

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Sometimes, we get lost in the flurry of life. Things are born, things happen in between, and then things are gone. But how often is this all thought about as a whole? People either dwell on the past, enjoy the present, or plan relentlessly for the future. In my street photography project, I attempted to chronicle life cycles with a universal approach: noticing all parts of life working together as time passes us by.

At first, my perspective absorbed only architecture—new construction, decaying buildings—and I began to see the sheer contrast in the design of New York City itself. Writer and composer Stephen Christian wrote of decaying buildings as “The orphaned anythings,” a troop of disregarded beings taking up space and watching time pass by without so much as an appreciative glance—but I made a point of looking for the ghosts of fervor in cracking walls and chipping paint. Sometimes, I was able to see these “orphaned anythings” so close to the newer, shiny glass and metal buildings that they were touching corner bricks, narrating the stories of technological advancement and architectural preservation–but then, I started to look at the bigger picture in an even bigger way: I began to look at the cycles of human life and activity.

Never before had I noticed such a beautiful melding of youth and age on these city streets, side-by-side going about various businesses without so much as a second glance. What seemed most intriguing, though, was how similar the facial expressions of all of these people could be. Nearly identical instances of joy, sorrow, curiosity, and pain could be seen on the faces of these people that I’d never even seen before, these people that I will likely never see again—much less learn their names, the reasons for their expressions. My favorite picture out of my twelve is “Old Man Enjoying the Sun:” as I crossed Allen Street on my daily walk home from class, I watched as a man closed his eyes and stopped for a brief moment, gratefully taking in the Sun’s last few rays as the wind picked up. I fumbled desperately for my camera, at first not even thinking that a shot of this man would work so well for my street photography project, and I snapped a quick shot over my shoulder as he turned and went on with his life up First Avenue. When I looked down at my camera to see if I had actually gotten the shot (after enduring a long list of failed “inconspicuous-angles”), I paused in shock: even after the moment had passed, this man had a look of hope on his face that was unmistakable. Looking back as he walked slowly uptown, I saw that frozen expression in my mind’s eye on the faces of two children skipping under a father’s arms to class that very morning, on the face of the man that washes the same section of sidewalk every morning on Third Avenue, on the faces of a soon-to-be-known band’s youngest techies running back and forth with amps and cases too big for them at The Bowery Electric. It was at this very moment that I noticed how powerful these life cycles are—especially as they work side-by-side to produce the remarkably full atmosphere of New York City.

As I walked slowly home in a chilling wind only offset by the warmth of shop entrances, I endeavored to capture these life cycles side-by-side in the same pictures, finding decay over growth, growth after decay. It started off with fences and plants, graffiti with traffic cones,

But then the camera became more than just a simple lens: it became a small avenue into the passing of time—and how though nothing may escape it in the end, we find ourselves in a beautiful world of conglomerate means towards that very end, an end that will never see the life cycles of New York City—or any place for that matter—reach it as a whole.