A Portrait on the Nasdaq Building

I took this photograph in the year 2000, standing in front of the Nasdaq building and staring at a giant portrait of a man whose name I never learned. The caption read “July 1985” — perhaps the date of his death — and the grainy, blown-up image suggested an older video still.

In the upper-left of the portrait, there were shelves lined with what looked like vinyl records. That detail nudged me toward thinking he might have been a musician or someone who worked in the recording industry. But it’s speculation. What I could say with certainty was that his expression stopped me in my tracks. There was a strange blend of joy and sadness in his eyes, as though he was remembering something both treasured and lost.

From a technical perspective, the image is busy — glass façades, steel frames, the bright JVC globe in the foreground, and the huge, pixelated human face. The intense reds of the billboard fight for dominance with the cooler tones of the surrounding buildings. I framed it to balance the round forms — the Nasdaq cylinder and the globe — against the more rigid geometry of the skyscrapers, letting the man’s face take central stage without cutting the context that made it surreal.

Shot on film, the grain is unapologetically present, adding to the slightly gritty feel of early digital billboard displays. The exposure was tricky; the bright LED reds could easily have blown out, but holding them meant letting the darker parts of the scene slip toward shadow. I made that choice deliberately — the man’s gaze and expression didn’t need perfect tonal balance; they needed presence.

I still don’t know who he was. But for that fleeting moment, twenty-five years after the date flashing beside him, his image was alive again, larger than life in the heart of New York.