Ready and Waiting for the Moment to Unfold – NYTimes.com

The people of New York are what drew me to photography. The medium itself only played a supportive role. When I moved to New York City in 1997, my favorite thing to do was ride the subway. Each subway car seemed to hold a distillation of the world’s diversity, and that was an unusual setting for me. I was raised in a suburb of Syracuse, New York, in a homogenous school district, and although I had lived in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco before I moved to New York, I wasn’t used to being so engaged by humanity.