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, a bright, commercial monolith interrupting the skyline. Below it, the Panasonic and NBC signage compress information into layers, competing for attention in a way that mirrors the experience of being there.