Ed Watts/ Stalk New York
Ed Watts/ Stalk New York 12
The act of photographing New York is at once a unique and personal activity but is also one that is inescapably part of a New York previously ‘imagined’.
This ‘imagining’ is the New York- ness of Scorsese and Woody Allen and of Coppola and Spike Lee- essentially a filmic New York – from which various tropes have leaked into the public consciousness creating a New York specific- which is almost impossible to side step in the mind of the photographer, the film maker or, indeed, the fiction writer.
Ed Watts/ Stalk New York 7
Yellow cabs, Coney Island, Little Odessa, Central Park, Empire State Building, St Marks Place, Brooklyn Bridge, CBGB’s, Lower East Side… and now, for such is the way of things, the Twin Towers – even in absence as Ground Zero – this is the materiality of this city turned myth in countless texts and images.
Marshal Berman in his introduction to “New York Calling’, astutely marks out one of many New York ironies, for all that it is the city of skyscrapers it remains a city borne out of a nineteenth – century street system, built for pedestrians to walk around and an early twentieth – century mass transport system to move whole streets of people en bloc. It is this site specific convergence and overlap of history and the modern that makes New York, in spite of the ever increasing gentrification, quite unique, a dynamic city only really experienced at street level.
Ed Watts/ Stalk New York 3
The ‘Stalk New York’ series of photographs by Ed Watts, flits between this imaginary and the real. In these pictures the mythic city is present if at times esoteric, whilst the viewer is located street level as a participant in Berman’s ‘street city of life’. Recalling the work of Harry Callahan and Lorca di Corcia, ‘Stalk New York’ reclaims the city from its routine repertoire of motifs and shapes and creates instead, a place we may recognise but is, here, somehow energised in these scenes.
Watts pictures, evoking nostalgia and intrigue by turn, are connected by the simple device of tight framing the central figure, creating dark, surreal like inversions of normative portraiture. Here, expectation is denied and a certain alienation takes place as the viewer is confronted only with the suggestion of the subject rather than the distinguishing features of the face, upon which we project and read so much. This device allied with the vignette edges of the frame create a very different space, these images signal a New York of surveillance, a New York in which the act of observing, indeed of looking is foregrounded as the viewer occupies the cameras furtive gaze.
At ground zero, in midtown and down at the Staten Island Ferry, Watts invokes a narrative, yes, of stalking.
Ed Watts/ Stalk New York 6
There is a tension between the Freidrich like silhouettes and the space they inhabit as, almost disembodied, these figures become agents through which the viewer is impelled to engage again with New York. The commonplace of the yellow cab and mid town become charged as we are forced to look through, beyond and aside of these unsettling avatars.
Watts’ ‘Stalk New York’ series succeeds in re presenting that most photographed, most mythic of places in a way that rewards patient observation. This is an achievement in itself.
John Donaldson, meatyard arts 2009
all images © 2009 Ed Watts. All rights reserved.
‘Stalk New York’ is a counterpoint show to the Urbis ‘State of the art: New York’ exhibit which highlights the work of sixteen artists emerging from New York City.
Watts’ exhibition highlights one Manchester based artist continuing the long legacy of European ‘outsider’ views of New York..
All portraits are shot on 120-colour film using a traditional instamatic camera.
All prints are archival, digital C-types.
For more information and to view more work please visit,