Ajax loader

2008 EDITION

July 8th - September 14th

Ethan Levitas - #49, From the series Untitled/This is just to say , New York City, 2004-2008

Ethan Levitas

UNTITLED / THIS IS JUST TO SAY

I have been photographing the New York City subway for four years, since 2004. Originally I was drawn to the unbelievable surfaces of the train cars. Battered by passage, imprinted by cryptic hands and relegated to the farthest ends of the city, the subway cars themselves seem to tell a unique story. I photograph the trains as individual subjects whose ‘experiences’ and ‘expressions’ bear witness to a particular time and a particular place. Each train offers its testimony simultaneously in metal and metaphor.

And then there are the passengers. Though the trains are always moving (while I photograph), I feel inextricably linked to the individuals inside. Shoulder to shoulder, braced against one another or pressed to the windows, each person passes me in a flash suspended. Alone, in a city of eight million people; alone, though there is likely someone inches away; each individual is alone but with me – connected – if only for an instant. Yet in this moment, and in the sum of all these moments, there is the seed of something larger and impossibly tangible. This is just to say: ‘We’.

Taken together, this work is a portrait not simply of people or place, but rather, of passage and exchange, of connection and contradiction, and finally (now that you have arrived), of conversations that would and should be.


Ethan Levitas


www.elprojects.com


Ethan Levitas

Born in 1971 in New York City, United States. Lives and works in New York City.


Ethan Levitas' work is concerned with expressions of being, belonging and otherness. His photographs are collected and exhibited widely, including presentations at the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom), the International Center of Photography, the Consulate General of Japan, the Brooklyn Arts Council and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. In 2008, his work will be featured in a major exhibition at the New York Public Library.

Levitas has lived and lectured extensively in Japan, where in 1999 he created and directed a pioneering art-in-education program for Japanese senior high schools, and in 2002 he published the program as a photo-based textbook, Outside and In: Conversations about Identity, which has been in international studies curricula throughout Japan used as a primary teaching material in international studies curricula throughout Japan. A self-taught artist, Ethan is a graduate of Cornell University (BA Political Science, 1993).

Ethan has been awarded the Aaron Siskind Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship, and the Kittredge Fund Fellowship, as well as multi-year project grants from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership. His portraits are frequently commissioned by The New Yorker magazine.