New York, 2016.

by Andreas Maxones.   

Before the world learned to hold its breath.

The camera never came up to my eye.

I carried it low, hip height,  the way you carry something you don’t want people to notice. The way you carry a secret.

I wasn’t hunting for photographs. I was hunting for something I couldn’t name. The city had a pulse you could feel through your shoes. Noise. Friction. Eight million lives running hot and parallel, never quite touching.

But it was the faces that undid me. Stressed. Serene. Somewhere a thousand miles behind their eyes.

I moved through them like water through a crowd. Close enough to hear breathing. Close enough to feel the heat of a stranger’s arm.

Almost invisible. Almost inside their lives. That’s the thing about a city, it lets you be a ghost. Present. Watching. Unremembered.

None of them knew I was there. And I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would never see any of them again. A single frame. A single second. Then the city swallowed us both.

Maybe that’s what made it feel like the truest thing I’d ever done.

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