Joseph Michael Lopez lived in New York until the age of four, when he left for Miami with his mother, who had emigrated from Cuba. He returned to the city as an adult, with a camera, at first assisting Bruce Weber, the great fin de siècle myth-maker of the advertising hoardings in Times Square. Off duty, Lopez was concerned with a different kind of framing of the city, however. He began making a series of pictures, “Dear New Yorker”, devoted to some of the glimpsed extremes that others may look away from as they moved about the streets. The pictures were a compulsive kind of anchoring. “I grew up in a bilingual, really fractured environment,” he told the New York Times, as he developed this project. “So for me the visual was more concrete.”
A beautifully edited book of two decades of Lopez’s pictures, JML NYC 02-23, is published this month. It features a series of implausibly lit black and white images of a city apparently conflicted between epiphany and dystopia: near abstract scenes of shadowy trysts and flashes of flesh; of drunks and addicts with spectral eyes; of figures emerging from subway miasmas or momentarily resolving themselves into geometries; young faces with looks that speak of too much experience, or that find themselves lost in the blocks and intersections of their own minds.
Often, as in this picture taken in Union Square, family groups come to seem startled or wary; the extra, contorted, maternal hand supporting the child from behind looks like an instinctive act of additional security, and one that feels entirely justified in the context of the book’s other images. The eyes of the figures here, meanwhile, seem to share the same kind of attention as the photographer: compelled to make some sense of the moment, and a little unnerved by some of what they are discovering.
