The Streets of Chelsea

I was a busy freelance photographer for nearly three decades, until a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis put an end to my career. 

I can’t move as fast or walk as far as I used to. Sometimes I can’t move at all. No longer the globetrotter, I now wander my own streets, photographing things I never noticed before. 

When Covid-19 roared into New York City In March of 2020 my very neighborhood West Chelsea shut down virtually overnight. Once teeming with tourists and exploding with construction and development, my streets and avenues and parks and bike paths soon became empty and gray. 

The Streets of Chelsea is a documentation of my continuously evolving neighborhood. As things change over the months, I change with it, widening my eye to take in the tenuous re-openings and the proliferation of outdoors-only activities. The rising cries of police brutality, the scores of angry protests. And the meaningless destruction and fear that followed in its wake. 

I show these photographs in the very place they are made – the streets of Chelsea. I affix them onto the scaffoldings of halted construction sites and the sides of abandoned buildings and street works. I present these photos to my West Chelsea neighbors, as an opportunity to consider all we’ve witnessed over these months. And to imagine what lies ahead for our vastly transformed neighborhood.