4 mins
"For almost three decades, I’ve been making visual art with New York City at its center. I’m especially drawn to everyday moments that, when you focus on them, have unexpected emotional power: the riveted expressions of lunchgoers scanning a salad bar, the split-second disorientation of commuters emerging from the subway onto the street. I work mostly in public, but I don’t know how to do that right now. So I find myself looking back on footage I shot in the past to try to make sense of the present. In the short documentary above, I revisited a video I shot in the early 1990s, of shopkeepers near my East Village apartment throwing open their gates in the morning, to reflect on the perpetual change and resilience that mark life in New York City." - Neil Goldberg