Joe Holmes Sees The City With His New York Pictures

By Author: Annika Jensen
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"Can you have a crush on a city?" asks master of urban photography Joe Holmes. If his New York pictures are any indication, the answer is a resounding yes. A resident for twenty-six years, Holmes always has an eye out for what's interesting and beautiful about New York, whether he's exploring its boroughs, roaming the corridors of its great institutions or looking down on it from above. His images capture a cinematic version of the city, where yellow taxicabs serendipitously line up in a perfect row and the magic-hour light bathes the rain-washed canyons of steel in its glow.

Beyond the city's buildings, Holmes' recent work also explores the urban outdoors as found in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. In the artist's own words, "I pursue a variety of urban landscape studies around New York City. And yet after several years of this, I realize I'm barely scratching the surface. Just when I think I've got a handle on capturing these famously gritty streets, I turn a corner and realize just how infinitely deep and rich this town really is." The latest solo exhibition of Holmes' work, The Urban Wilderness, at Jen Bekman Gallery in ...
... New York, featured twelve of these stark, snowy landscapes for which Holmes has become so well-loved. While at first glance the images might be mistaken for the wilderness far away from city streets, these too are New York pictures. Looking deeper into the image, lamps lining a path come into focus, and faint hints of distant benches can be seen. Tiny details emerge and what looks like wilderness trekkers are revealed to be a dog walker or a couple on a park hike. On his blog The Year in Pictures, gallerist and photography expert James Danziger said the show conveys the ""...magical feeling of the urban metropolis transformed into a wintery Eden. Joe's values may be old-fashioned - he's someone looking to find the sublime or the memorable in the everyday - but his pictures have a nice contemporary feel due to their color and scale.""

Joseph Holmes' photos have been exhibited in dozens of shows across the country and are featured in the international survey, Photography Now: One Hundred Portfolios. Joe was one of four photographers in the national print campaign "Stunning Nikon," which appeared in National Geographic, People and many other magazines in 2005 and 2006. As part of Berlin Meets New York, twenty-eight photos from his series, joe's nyc, were displayed on multimedia screens in Berlin subway trains in 2006. For more than three years, his daily photographs of New York City have been syndicated in Charlie Suisman's Manhattan User's Guide. Joe's short stories have appeared in the literary journals Phantasmagoria, The North Atlantic Review and Pikeville Review. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Writer Annika Jensen admires and collects urban photography. Jensen is particularly captivated by New York pictures that capture the magical moments in the city she calls home.