Times Square: Dreams and Desperation
A long-term street study of Times Square as an American dream factory, where global spectacle collides with labor, historical erasure and street-level desperation.
Times Square: Dreams and Desperation examines a place that has become both a symbol of America and a mechanism through which America imagines its own importance. Its illuminated screens, global brands and constant reproduction in movies, television and advertising project an image of New York as the center of cultural life. For many visitors, Times Square is therefore not optional. It is a place they feel they must see in order to have properly arrived in New York.
What they encounter at street level is less coherent. Tourists move among costumed characters, street hustlers, counterfeit mascots, aspiring performers, religious preachers, police, pickpockets and people selling photographs, tickets, CDs or brief encounters. Workers step out of character to smoke, drink, rest, argue or count money. The fantasy repeatedly breaks down, then begins again for the next passing crowd.
The district operates as an embodiment of capitalism and as a simulacrum of public life. Its screens present perfected images of beauty, wealth, pleasure and belonging, while the street beneath them remains crowded, dirty, improvised and economically precarious. People labor inside the image while remaining largely excluded from the life it promises.
Times Square has also been repeatedly rewritten. The sex shops, adult theaters and visible disorder associated with its earlier identity were displaced as the district was remade into a controlled tourist destination and corporate advertising environment. Yet the older city has not entirely disappeared. Its ghosts remain in the transactions, performances, scams, desires and forms of desperation that continue beneath the cleaned surfaces.
The project considers how American exceptionalism is converted into spectacle and circulated around the world. Times Square promises proximity to the center of culture, money and visibility. The photographs ask what happens when that promise is encountered from the pavement, and what kinds of labor, exclusion and desperation are required to keep the dream illuminated.
