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Santino’s Photo& Video at Broadway
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Just Another Times Square View
I made this photograph in 2000, standing in Times Square with a Canon film camera loaded with Portra 160. It was a different city then—louder in some ways, rougher at the edges, less polished than the LED-saturated spectacle it would later become. What interested me was not the chaos itself, but the uneasy coexistence between permanence and transience: stone and steel on one side, light and commerce on the other. The composition is deliberately vertical, almost architectural. The frame stacks elements upward rather than outward: the dense mass of midtown buildings rises on the left, while the illuminated billboards dominate the right. The Budweiser sign acts as a visual anchor,…
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Mulberry Street, When Benito II Was Still There…
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Arriba El Mexico!
I took this photograph from the passenger seat of a cab, during that suspended moment when traffic stalls and the city becomes a collage of reflections and colour. The small felt figure hanging from the mirror caught my attention first—bright, slightly absurd, and placed without irony. The tiny sombrero, the stitched flag, the green felt body: a souvenir turned mascot, living in the blurred space between décor and identity. What interested me was how this small object commanded the frame. The background—city lights, signage, fragments of buildings—exists only as colour fields and soft shapes. The mirror picks up hints of the driver, the interior, and the street behind us, but…
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A Zeppelin in The New York Sky
New York, 2000. I remember looking up from the crowded streets and seeing it — a zeppelin, drifting slowly above the jagged canyon of Midtown’s architecture. In that moment, it felt like something out of a different century had quietly slipped into ours. I didn’t have much time to think; I just framed, focused, and released the shutter. The composition is as much about absence as it is about presence. The airship is small, almost swallowed by the negative space of the sky, yet the buildings act as monumental bookends, forcing the eye toward the centre. The turquoise cast of the glass facade on the left and the warm brick…
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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…
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Slow Walk at Mulberry St.
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Leaving The Actor’s Studio
No, the title is not a misspell. To perform as a true artist, the Actors Studio must actually become an actor’s studio. Shot handheld on a cold night in New York, I framed this outside the famous 44th Street façade of The Actors Studio. What drew me wasn’t the name, but the irony held in the glow above the door. Big, institutional lettering—THE ACTORS STUDIO—brightly lit, looming. Yet below it, a single man stands, barely visible, caught in the diffused downlight from the marquee. It wasn’t staged. He just was there—half-shadowed, alone, waiting. Technically, this is a push to the edge. ISO was high, grain heavy. Shadows crush into black. Highlights…
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The Lost Battle
Against the New York traffic, the controllers themselves, contended in vain.
