We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gerard Doolan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Gerard, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
In the spring of 2009, I stepped out onto the street and, alone in the city, began to compose a lifelong visual essay on New York, a place that is both threateningly and bewilderingly fascinating. Those initial months, although I didn’t know back then, were the starting point of what I would eventually come to do today. These photographs represent the dazzling drama of the street and form an open letter to the city and the generations of people who have called it home.
Gerard, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m a black and white street photographer who documents the rapid changes in the life of New York. My work reimagines familiar icons and documents the reality and complexities of the human condition in the modern world.
I recently released the book ‘A Diamond as Big as The Ritz’ and I’ve been a posted Photographer for Leica USA. Currently, I’m working on a 2nd book titled ‘Transcendental America’
Publications that have featured my work include Docu, Interpubliq, Minimalism and B&W Magazines.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
My goal is to leave behind a body of work that pulsates with the times we now inhabit. An artifact of what it was like to experience New York’s heart-stopping magic, during an increasingly torn and distracted age. An enduring documentation, immortalizing the lives lived, whether in squalor or splendour, that arrived at the city’s gates on a hurried wave, made their mark on the sand and left with the tide.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
The post-war writings of Ada Louise Huxtable and Jane Jacobs’ seminal book ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ have certainly informed my visual philosophy as a photographer. Both writers challenged the prevailing orthodoxies that existed in New York and provided a counter-narrative to the monolithic theories of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus.
Their work would go on to save architectural icons like Grand Central Terminal and whole districts of SoHo from destruction. Yet despite this, in time, all monuments fall, and I think this drives my desire to record both the forgotten city blocks and the daily lives of New Yorkers, those, unbeknownst to themselves, who have become the city’s lifeblood.
Contact Info:
- Website: .
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gdoolanphoto
Image Credits
© Gerard Doolan