Italiano
Le immagini che compongono Red Eye to New York nascono per puro caso, figlie di una turista inconsapevole per le strade della tanto mitizzata New York degli anni ’80. L’autrice Janet Delaney, a causa del suo lavoro in un laboratorio fotografico di San Francisco, era solita trovarsi nella Grande Mela per una manciata di ore. Alla stregua di intrepreti come Vivian Maier, l’autrice vagava per le strade della città scattando con la sua Rolleiflex con fare famelico catturando ogni aspetto della realtà che la circondava, filtrandola con la sua distinta sensibilità.
L’opera è corredata da un testo di Amanda Maddox, curatrice associate nel dipartimento di fotografia del J.Paul Getty Museum di Los Angeles.
English
Throughout the 1980s, Janet Delaney’s job in a San Francisco photography lab was punctuated by the last-minute flights she would take to New York as a courier. Within these unexpected pockets of time she spent in New York, Delaney would wander the streets with her Rolleiflex camera, attending to the rhythms and characters of this much-mythologised city. Despite being tired and often lost, the act of photographing made Delaney feel present and alert, in tune with the crowds that pushed past her and mesmerised by the depth of history woven into the city’s structures.
The colour photographs that make up this series are brimming with life and reveal the formation of Delaney’s generous approach to photographing streets and the people who inhabit them, capturing the precious mixture of private lives lived in public and transient moments of connection between photographer and subject.
With a text by Amanda Maddox, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
