The big picture: the giant of 42nd Street
Jonathan Higbee’s eye for the uncanny reveals an alternative New York where what is seen can not always be believed
Jonathan Higbee came quite late to photography. He grew up in the American south and started his career as a travel writer, but when he moved to New York he discovered that words and sentences could not do justice to the streets he lived on.
In the first instance, he has suggested, photography was a cheap surrogate for therapy, a way of slowing Manhattan down and forcing himself to look and find patterns in the apparently chaotic visual scene around him. He started to get a feel for odd coincidences in that chaos – moments when the background of street furniture and high rise and billboard and graffiti and traffic seemed to communicate directly with the people passing by: stripes on shirts that matched zebra crossings; legs extending from bus shelters that made a comic tableau with adverts; accidents of scale and serendipity that seemed like the fleeting work of an inspired choreographer.