American Backyard: Photographs in Central Park

Central Park is often described as New York’s backyard, but the phrase can make the park sound passive—a green refuge waiting outside the city. American Backyard looks instead at how the park is continually made through use. Across lawns, paths, benches, boulders, playgrounds and water, strangers turn public space into temporary rooms: places to rest, flirt, read, pray, perform, play, work and watch one another.

Photographed across seasons and over a decade, the project follows the park’s shifting social life rather than a single event or community. Families, couples, workers, tourists, athletes, worshippers, anglers, children and animals share the frame. The designed landscape moves between backdrop and participant, directing bodies into contact while allowing private gestures to unfold in full public view.

The photographs resist the idea of Central Park as an escape from New York. The city remains present in its skyline, signs, labor, spectacle and inequalities, even where trees and water appear to hold it at a distance. American Backyard treats the park as a commons and a stage: a manufactured landscape where belonging is improvised, intimacy becomes visible, and everyday life briefly gathers into pictures.