Urban Zips
In this project, I merge my love of abstract expressionist painting with my longstanding work in street photography.
When I was in college in New York City, the Museum of Modern Art was my second home. I would sit mesmerized in front of large canvasses of abstract expressionist painters—Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko. Barnett Newman (active 1945-70) I came to later.
Fast forward many years and—still an avid museum-goer—I became a street photographer, working in color. I photographed people walking around the city—doing their thing—in front of colorful backdrops of storefronts and posters.
To merge these two interests, I have created my own kind of “zips,” the term Barnett Newman coined for his large canvasses. His “zips” are paintings of one color with thin bands of another color dividing the frame.
I had two tasks: look through my street photographs to identify slices of life to use as “bands,” and take new photographs of pavement, walls, and other surfaces to use as the field of color. As I went on, I departed more and more from Newman’s zips by capturing text and graphics in my color fields.
