Fieldwork
Some photographs are made to be shared, not sold. Street and documentary work begins with an encounter: a stranger's glance in a doorway, a family passing on a cart, a child's joke offered to a lens. These moments were given, not arranged, and the people in them are not models but participants in lives that continued long after the shutter closed. Such photography does not create a moment; it bears witness to one. The streets of Cairo, the workshops of Hoi An, the markets of Manila, and the people met along the way are recorded here as they were, in the light that happened to fall on them. These images honor the people in them, their work, the places they come from, and the brief moment they allowed a stranger to see them.
Kalye
In the Philippines, life spills onto the kalye, the street. Sidewalks become shopfronts, curbs become waiting rooms, and stalled traffic becomes a marketplace. Vendors weave between jeepneys with water and newspapers, neighbors linger in the doorways of sari-sari stores, and children claim any stretch of pavement as a playground.
These photographs come from those in-between places: a man pausing beneath a peeling blue pillar, a boy absorbed in play among shuttered storefronts, a figure passing a sunlit wall.
Palengke
In the Philippines, the day begins at the palengke, the public market where the city buys what it eats. Under corrugated roofs and bare bulbs, vendors stack oranges into pyramids, lay out rows of silver fish on ice, and swing cleavers through pork at worn wooden blocks. The palengke is loud, wet, and crowded, and it is where the real economy of the city happens: face to face, by the kilo, over a hanging scale. These photographs follow it from the fruit stalls to the fish and meat sections, where the day's work reaches its most direct form.
Matadero
Before the palengke opens, the work begins at the matadero, the municipal slaughterhouse. In the hours before dawn, a crew in red shirts moves through steam and running water: scalding, scraping, cleaning, and hanging the carcasses that will be at the meat stalls by morning. This is the part of the food chain most people never see. The men here work quickly and without ceremony, in a room of tile, steel, and hooks, doing a job that is physical, skilled, and relentless. These photographs record that labor as it is.
This gallery contains images of animal slaughter.
Faces of Hoi An
For centuries, Hoi An was a trading port on the Thu Bồn River, where goods and traditions arrived from across Asia and stayed. The old town now draws visitors from around the world, but in its workshops, along the riverbanks, and in the villages nearby, the older crafts continue: weaving by hand, shaping wood and bamboo, and steering round basket boats through the water palms.
These are portraits of the people who carry that work forward, many of them elderly, practicing skills learned in childhood that fewer young people now take up. Their faces hold the same patience as their craft. These photographs were made in brief encounters, and they are kept here in gratitude to the people who allowed a stranger to watch them work.
The Two Lands
The pharaohs called Egypt the Two Lands: Upper and Lower Egypt, joined under a single crown. The name still fits. In Cairo and Giza, two Egypts share the same ground: the monuments of the ancient kingdom, and the living city that has grown up to their edges.
These photographs move between them. Camel handlers wait at the foot of the Great Pyramid. A carved wooden mashrabiya frames the apartment blocks beyond it. A replica of Nefertiti looks out across a room where a veiled woman returns the viewer's gaze. Donkey carts pass beneath power-plant smokestacks, and verses carved in stone keep their watch over a restless city. What endures and what goes on living are never far apart here. Each is written over the other, layer on layer, like the land itself.
City of Peace
Jerusalem's name is often translated as City of Peace. Its Old City is less than a square kilometer, divided into four quarters and held sacred by three faiths. These photographs were made on Jerusalem Day, when an annual march passes through the Old City's gates and streets. By day and into the night, flags fill the lanes and young marchers sing and dance. Along the route, shopkeepers in the Muslim Quarter pull down their shutters, men sit and watch from doorways and steps, police line the walls, and in a quiet stairway a boy stands apart from it all.
The same stones hold every side of the day: celebration and grievance, faith and fear, passing within arm's reach of one another along streets that have seen it all before.
Mekong Delta
The Vietnamese call it Cửu Long, the Nine Dragons, after the nine mouths through which the Mekong reaches the sea. Here the river is the road, the market and the backyard. Along the banks, life goes on at the water's edge.
As roads and bridges reach deeper into the delta, the floating markets are thinning, and this way of living is slowly giving way. These photographs are a record of it while it lasts.
Tonle Sap
In Tonle Sap, children learn to paddle almost as soon as they learn to walk. They row themselves to school across open water, and help with the nets, the ice and the day's chores. There is little room for idle childhood. These photographs ask "where do the children play?" without pretending to answer it. They show childhood shaped by water and work, and a resilience that doesn't need our pity, only our attention.
Hold Still
In New York City, everyone is on stage--the pose, the grin, the phone held at arm's length. The city is full of people making images of themselves. Most everyone here is making an image, and I was among them, quietly making mine. The result is a portrait of a city watching itself, where the line between performer and audience keeps moving. Hold Still is for both: the ones who stop for the picture, and the few who never do.