Sheldon Serkin
Chicago Center for Literature and Photography Photographer Feature October 24, 2013
Location: New York City, New York Sheldon Serkin has been shooting street photography in New York City with an iphone since 2010. His work has been featured on a number of websites, including iphoneography.com, lifeinlofi.com, iphoneographycentral.com, eyeem.com, and gothamist.com, as well as on shortlists in the Mobile Photo Awards in both 2012 and 2013. He recently contributed a tutorial to “The Art Of iphone Photography� by Bob Weil and Nicki Fitz-Gerald. He is currently preparing Awful Bliss, his first book of street photographs, and posts daily on instagram, eyeem, and flickr as @shelserkin, and on his blog, awfulbliss. tumblr.com.
I have so many questions about your street portraits: How do you pick your subjects? How has your experience been, approaching strangers? What do you try to do for your subjects, as a photographer?
Deciding to shoot a subject is instinctive for me. Usually, there’s no time between the initial draw and the shooting for me to reflect and analyze why I’m drawn to the subject at hand – if I did that, I’d miss that moment of character or action that initially drew me to the subject! I also very rarely approach my subjects. I do all my shooting with an iphone, which makes it easy for me to appear to not be taking pictures at all. As a photographer, I try to represent my subjects not as they are, but as how I see them. In the decisions I make - black and white or color, composition, processing – I try to bring out what it was that attracted me to them: to stylize their reality for my own ends.
My favorite portrait has to be “Lilly.” What was her story? Was she as all-business as she looks? Lilly was 100% all business! She was there to sell girl scout cookies, and she was NOT happy about it at all. I don’t know if I would have been either, as it was about 9:00 AM on a Saturday at a shopping mall. She was definitely one subject I would have loved to speak to, but I think her expression and body language says it all.
Were you involved in Occupy Wall Street, or were you just there to shoot? What are your feelings on it, two years later? I was drawn to Occupy Wall Street as a photographer. I believed in the movement and what it attempted to do during that time, and I felt that my participation was best suited to documenting. It was very exciting at the time to be there – the energy was palpable! I made 4 or 5 excursions to shoot in Zuccotti Park, and, at each successive visit, it was larger, noisier and more Felliniesque. The last time I went before they were evicted, it had definitely become something I think was removed from their initial intention - I photographed a lot of tourists and media. I still believe in the movement, and laud their efforts postSuperstorm Sandy.
In your landscapes of New York City, you depict something that looks like a magical reality; your use of contrast and saturation makes it look sort of Oz-like. Is that your intention or your perspective on the city? I hadn’t really thought about it before, but, yes, I guess it is my perspective on the city! I love New York City, especially when, in the urban drabness that we get accustomed to, colors and scenes pop out at me while I’m making my way through the city. I certainly try to emphasize that attraction in my processing: sometimes I like to push colors to see how far they can go.
flickr.com/shelserkin awfulbliss.tumblr.com cclapcenter.com/features