Matthew Pillsbury’s “Sanctuary” Finds Solace in American Cities | The New Yorker

For more than a decade, Matthew Pillsbury has been photographing city scenes using long exposures, a process that turns his environs, whether a cherry-blossom-filled park in Tokyo or the High Line in New York City, into opalescent blurs of light and movement. Pillsbury’s work last appeared on Photo Booth in 2015, when we featured his exuberant series devoted to summertime in New York City—rooftop parties, the Coney Island boardwalk, Prospect Park Bandshell, and public pools glinting and shining in the sun. In the months since the Presidential election, though, the tone of Pillsbury’s work has shifted. For the photos featured in his new exhibition, “Sanctuary” (opening at Benrubi Gallery, in Chelsea, on September 14th), Pillsbury told me that he was interested in “how we maneuver the pathways in between the political chaos,” and how cities, even with their crowds and chaos, can act as sites of refuge and facilitate acts of resistance. His photo of the Women’s March on Washington, taken for the New York Times Magazine, became one of the most indelible images of the event. In it, an array of pink pussy hats forms a shimmering sea around the Washington Monument, which soars above the crowd stark and in focus. Pillsbury’s long exposures have a way of highlighting individuals who are lost in private moments as the city whirls around them—the man sitting by himself on a diner bench, the woman lost in the screen of her phone. That kind of atomized urban existence is on display in “Sanctuary,” too, such as in a photo of a woman taking a selfie at sunset on North Avenue Beach, in Chicago, standing alone on a vast stretch of sand that reaches back toward the skyline. But other images in the series emphasize the city as a collective space. Recently, Pillsbury went to Columbus Circle to photograph a protest against President Donald Trump’s plan to end daca. At the edge of one photo from the event, you can just make out the blurry slogan of a sign—“Protect daca! Here to Stay!”—but it’s the cloud of protesters, unified in their display of resistance, that keeps the eyes fixed to the frame.