Behind the Image: New York on One Lens

I took one camera and one lens to New York for ten days and came back with four frames worth printing. That ratio sounds bad until you consider that a bag full of lenses would have produced four hundred frames and, in my experience, the same four pictures.

The constraint is not aesthetic purity, it is speed. There is no decision to make about focal length, so the only decision left is where to stand and when to press. In a city moving this fast that is the difference between having the frame and watching it leave.

This one is steam and sodium light on a block I had walked past twice already. The third time the light was on and the street was empty for about four seconds.

Printed on cotton rag with pigment inks rated well beyond a hundred years. Shipped unmounted, from the UK.