Street-Smart I

Photographs
2010

As the Train Set of Decay series of urban miniatures progressed, I began to focus intensively on using the sets as a means to create elaborate, staged photographs in contrast to the candid snapshot approach of my earlier works. I repurposed some of the more successful miniature buildings from the original series and also constructed over ten new structures from laser-cut CAD drawings. I generated these original drawings after careful research into the features of tenement buildings in the East Village. Finally, I created a portable two-by-two-foot module of a self-contained street scene. Using the portable module as the foreground of my compositions, I staged photo shoots in Brooklyn with actual city streets as the background. The resulting photographs are surreal juxtapositions of time, scale, and place―time warps from a gentrifying city into an earlier era of decay and wildness.