Category: Asides

I hope that my work can remind us that imagination can defy gravity and bend time. It is our own responsibility to enjoy every second of the day. Nobody else can do that for us. Have fun, eat candy, do what you love, love what you do… We might get thrown off this spinning ball of iron and mantle tomorrow.

There is a paradox in Levinstein’s approach that is shared by legions of greater and lesser street photographers: he was hunting for the poetry of real life, but what he shot was generally the sort of thing that street photographers generally shoot. Not the types of people or situations that you barely notice because they are so ordinary, but people who seem strange, marginal or ridiculous. The Beat generation’s coolly noirish, anti-bourgeois spirit animates his work.

“I walk through a low entrance, stepping over a large puddle while crouching to avoid the wooden beam of a door frame,” A. K. Kimoto wrote. “It’s dark. As my eyes adjust, I see a figure sitting in a corner as gentle wisps of smoke slowly dance across the room. … I’ve come to these remote settlements in Badakhshan, Afghanistan, to find out why so many of the inhabitants have become addicted to opium.”