I’ll keep the writing short today, which is not my strong suit. And I have a lot to say, but not the energy at the moment.

I decided (like obsession is a decision) to knock out the end of this book, and the last chapters are massive and daunting. Earlier today, I finished the second-to-last, and have to gear up for one final gargantuan chapter before I’m finished with this two-year beast of a project. So close. Sorta close.

Between that, work, life, a third leak in a year, and the world blowing up, I’ve been in a bit of an emergency mode, and frankly, I just don’t think it’s going to be possible to write here as regularly as I’m planning until I finish this final chapter.

Anyway, I’ll ruin the book’s conclusion here, as this place is a good sounding board, but the process of writing the book basically led me to the conclusion of how significantly I’m on the spectrum for autism. It all makes sense now, thinking back to all the symptoms and the invisible forces, deep down, I felt that I was fighting, or at least just trying to understand. It’s been fascinating learning about the subject. I’ll share more in a future post.

In the meantime, I will post regularly over the next two months, but with light writing, and I’ll probably mostly share these photographs that I’ve been scanning from my grandmother, Margaret (Peggy) Lombardo.

I’ve been finding and scanning all the best work from her archive at Gowanus Darkroom (lovely place), and that’s been another beast of a project. I knew she was an astounding photographer, but had absolutely no clue as to the scale, and how serious she took photography, until I recently explored the full archive.

I think I have a good 5-6 full scanning days left, if I’m lucky, and then some serious organizing. There’s a lot of history here. It’s a wild experience to go through, along with old letters, a written family history, little books my grandfather and his friends made, and other things.

Some of the photographs in her collection are from my grandfather’s friends during road trips, I believe, but it’s impossible to discern authorship for many of them, and most of these are from my grandmother.

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Asa Nisi Masa by Blake Andrews

Let’s explore the word Suburban,

I was a little uncomfortable about typecasting Blake Andrews’ work as ‘suburban.’ I am possibly one of the world’s least qualified to understand true suburbia, and it’s a word I throw around because I can’t find a better one. I have a similar relationship with the word Street.

In asking Blake about it, he wrote:

“I’m not sure if the word ‘suburbia’ is accurate to describe my work. Many of the photos in Asa Nisi Masa are from Portland and other cities. And Eugene doesn’t feel very suburban, at least the parts of it where I live and typically shoot. More like a mid-size city with alleys and graffiti and grime. But maybe it is suburban in relation to NYC, which tends to impose its own scale on other places? But anyway, I usually find suburbs pretty boring too, and hard to make good photos there…”

“I think this difficulty in defining suburbia might offer a clue about my pictures and my photo instincts. I generally find suburbs too predictable to simulate picturemaking. The things that tend to grab my interest and make me shoot photos are the ‘mistakes’ in the social landscape.”

I replied:

“That’s super funny and very true about the suburbia label. As you said, I consider 1-2 stops further from me in the subway in Brooklyn to be suburbia-ish. I’ll need to think up a better umbrella term to use. I definitely meant the less populated non-ducks-in-a-barrel city traditional type street photography. Which translates well to all the people who live in suburbia or close to quieter / smaller cities, who despair that nothing is as ‘interesting’ as NYC… The grass is always greener.”

I recall in college, how my McFarland, Wisconsin friends used to love to make fun of my city traits. (McFarland is a suburb outside of Madison, Wisconsin).

How I’d walk diagonally across the street, stare dumbfounded at the cornfield view from a friend’s parents’ kitchen window, and how they were always in disbelief that I didn’t have my license—or care. Or, god forbid, when I once referred to an unkempt backyard as a field.

I recall driving (or, in my case, passengering) from Wisconsin to NYC with four friends in a big SUV, observing people get skinnier and skinnier at every gas station on the way east. The tables eventually turned on my cornfed German-heighted friends when we got to the city, wide-eyed as we watched two people get out of their cars and fistfight on the West Side Highway, right in front of us; we hadn’t even made it into Manhattan yet. ‘This doesn’t usually happen,’ I say.

We drive down Broadway through wall-to-wall traffic in Times Square, because of course I’m a 22-year-old Manhattanite and have no idea how to use the highways. They are excited to see the Ghostbusters library. They don’t know what hummus is. As we get to the East Village, we pass by the Cube at Astor Place and notice a woman with her top half up, a man making out with her breast. ‘This doesn’t usually happen,’ I say.

Not to be mistaken with the SoHo Suburbans.

I don’t know how to describe it with a better phrase, but to boil down what suburbia is in my mind. It’s any place with mostly single-family homes or where you need a car to survive. Or that didn’t have hummus in the early 2000s.

How would Hunter Thompson describe it? A stillness in the air, a lack of ambient static, accidental run-ins, micro-interactions, happenstance surprises. Eyes from the windows and not in the streets, as Jane Jacobs coined.

Usually if I take the subway into Manhattan, I take a small camera and capture candids, with occasional portraits. I try to remind myself to notice the backgrounds and details and portrait opportunities—to not be fully distracted by all the fancy people rushing by.

When I take the subway outwards, I typically bring a bigger medium-format camera. I lead by asking for portraits, and I try to remind myself to capture a few candids. A larger camera helps me look like a photographer and not someone sneaking around, and the medium format works well when focusing more on backgrounds, details, textures, and portraying subtle colors.

Blake’s book inspired me to go for a walk.

In addition to Blake, I often recommend John Gossage, Mimi Plumb, and Gregory Halpern for inspiration in these areas, but of course, there are a million others. I’ll make a list for a future column.

I grew up with the work of Alec Soth, which is a funny way to say it because he’s not much older. Minnesotan, an incredible writer and educator. I like photographers who write or integrate writing into their work. And I believe that one of the most insulting and untrue phrases in American discourse is that those who can’t do, teach. That philosophy is what got us into our current predicament.

I’ve mentioned before that in retrospect, my father was somewhat on the spectrum, so sharing emotions wasn’t something he excelled at. So I admired and connected with Soth’s ability to use photography, writing, and teaching to express himself.

To simplify, Alec began his photobook career traveling the Mississippi, youthfully exploring both himself and middle America. There is a loneliness and solitude throughout, but the book lies between hope and darkness. Always a stone’s throw from the water, the book is also always a stone’s throw from the American Dream. It’s omnipresent in the background, yet not quite there.

His followup explored forlorn Niagara, with a heart-wrenching ending of stories and love letters. I was hooked with how quiet the book was until you got to the end, and the words in the letters and stories jumped off the page.

Yet the book which really made me connect with Soth’s mentality was Broken Manual, made to look like a survivalist guide hidden inside a larger book, exploring the lives of people who have escaped a traditional life. At the height of Soth’s breakthrough, at a pivotal moment, and he wanted to escape. Witnessing him explore these urges, I think, helped me notice them in myself. For me, escape was about survival, and I felt the same of his subjects. Now I just need to find a part-time cave somewhere.

I recall learning about Soth’s slow process with people. It was the complete opposite of my nervous, often insane swirls of anxious rambling energy. But I think, in a similar vein, back to when I was doing weekly portraits and interviews of strangers in the East Village as a way to connect with my family history. Except in my case, my meticulousness was with the interviews, while taking a few relaxed simple portraits during that process.

I’m going to end this by talking about something I’ve been seeing everywhere online. And we’ll talk about Mamdani and some NYC politics in the New Year, as I don’t want to burn you all out. I’m a fan, if it’s not clear, but I realize a lot of people are worried about him for a variety of reasons.

Which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about lately, related to loneliness, masculinity, and how we talk about these issues in public. Throughout the news this year, there has been the idea shared that ‘men are lonely,’ and that lonely alt-right men swung the 2024 election.

For instance, businessman and amateur sociologist Scott Galloway has been doing a media tour promoting his new book about masculinity. His videos always have fascinating statistics, but philosophically, I think this premise frames the question all wrong. It is not a problem of masculinity.

Women are lonely as well (although they seem to be handling that much better at the moment than men). And yes, the stratospherically wealthy used the unregulated social platforms and algorithms to target men to make them even lonelier and angrier. But this can’t be framed as just a male problem because the only just-male solutions out there are Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan.

Campbell Soup executive called its products food for “poor people,” lawsuit claims.

Keep in mind that the popular statistic that women speak more than men isn’t true (just ask any woman in corporate America). These widely cited numbers are made up, such as women speaking 20,000 words a day versus 7,000 for men, tracing back to Christian marriage books. It is extraordinarily difficult to differentiate between what is innate, what is perceived, and what has been learned from a millennia of social conditioning.

Everyone can claim their group has the most important problem, and that it’s the other groups that are too reactionary. But the reactionary feelings have been baked into all of us. Even just the idea of polarization can be propagandized for political purposes, as the “‘polarisation narrative’ simplifies complex issues through a bad analogy: the construction of a spectrum where good should be found in the middle of diametrically opposed political positions.”

Anyway, enough politics and amateur sociology for now. Let’s all escape and go for a walk around the block…

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*Note: I recently redid my entire website archive, including the documentary section and the prints section. I organized, edited, and keyworded 1,163 photos, also creating a super fun searchable archive. I included everything from the classic city photos, the documentary work, to any random city moments that I might want to find quickly for this column. Try it, type terms like ‘Trump, Lower East Side, red, dog, capitalism,’ anything you can think of: jamesmaherphotography.com/images.

 

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I have a dream. It’s a recurring dream, where I find out I never graduated from college, a handful of classes short, which I’m suddenly told about.

In some versions of the dream, I depressingly go back to college, while all my friends have moved on. In others, I take online classes. But in each version, I can’t do the work, I don’t study; I plan to cram, but as the time to the test gets closer and closer, focusing gets hard and harder. I fail the test, take the class again, then the same thing happens over and over. I’m so close, yet I just can’t get myself to do the work.

It’s funny because of how useless my degree and college time was for my education, except for the inspiration to download Photoshop to make fake IDs.

This is an ADD dream. Always feeling like you’re failing, because often you are in the traditional sense, yet it’s for a reason. You’re somewhere else more important, and your brain just doesn’t let you do the thing you’re supposed to. As a child in the strict structures of education, this can be torture, and the recurring dream certainly brings up that trauma.

I get the dream strictly when I’m in the midst of an obsession, a work push, or anything seemingly impractical in the short-term that I can’t keep my brain off of, all while the regular tasks of keeping up with life start to falter. But I’d never have this career if it weren’t for those obsessions, for those falters.

Anyway, so after spending a lot of time working on my writing and transitioning parts of my business this year, I had a recent reality check where we had some new sudden expenses, and I had to turn the business back on to full strength, in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the country, so fun.

You can possibly tell from this column that I’m pretty decent at coding & technology, through the sheer brutal force of time, struggle, and obsession with it. But what you probably don’t know is how much I hate working with it; it’s torture, what they’ve made us do to survive in 2025, and for the last two decades of this technological revolution.

In college, I saw learning technology and web design as a way out, and learned it on my own time. But most of what I learned came after college. And the drive to learn how to survive through these means came strictly from the sheer terror of thinking about having to step foot again in a school or office.

While I feel like my ADD has improved in adulthood, you put me back in school, and it all comes rushing back. I spent this past Tuesday morning in my kid’s 1st-grade class for a parent event, and two minutes in, my leg started twitching. I felt the walls closing in, my mind started wandering, thinking about anything other than what’s happening in the room. It’s a slow type of torture.

If you have a photography business, any internet business, or any business at all, give the website a check, as the obsessive work over the last few months has been bringing in about 1.5-2 times the job leads. I know, this is boring, mind-knumbing stuff to talk about instead of artistic, photography things, which I promise I’ll lean into more in the New Year as I finish this life repositioning.

But just so you know me better, a lot of these crazy, intense things I do really stem from that. This column and the site is meant to be a system to communicate in a ‘connected’ world that has pretended to help us communicate while making true communication much tougher and fraught with pitfalls, Zuckersbergs, and alt-right content.

Anyway, check out the archive—https://jamesmaherphotography.com/prints/.

*And I want to give a hat tip—the impetus for the search was my recently being shown Daniel Arnold’s similar super interesting search here (compare it to mine). He’s got a new excellent book out, You Are What You Do, by Loose Joints.

The hits of Daniel Arnold hit very hard, and I very much enjoy the overall feeling of his work: messy, dreamy, surreal yet all too real—searching for something. He also includes photographs from his life in a way I’m not good at. Or I should rather say, I just can’t will myself to want to do. I prefer instead to write about my life, and photography is for when I’m simultaneously escaping yet confronting it.

And for anyone who has trouble finding inspiration photographing the suburbs, I’d also recommend Blake Andrews’ new book, Asa Nisi, although sorry to say it’s sold out. Blake’s work hits at the assumption that the suburbs are in any way more orderly and less messy than the city. They are just as messy and absurd (perhaps even moreso?) yet there is also a fondness and a joy to the work. There’s a twisted quality, a philosophy that, to me, oscillates between a darker edge and a more optimistic edge. Blake’s work has even more of an absurd edge to it than Arnold’s, yet underlying it is a realism that you also find in his writing.

These are the reasons I enjoy Arnold’s and Andrews’ work, seeing things and places in ways that I don’t. And it’s easy to feel competitive with someone who shoots the same city and is a similar age (and of course has like 300,000+ IG followers), but those motivations are an important thing, and its a wonderful book.

Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans, and cheers to completing an obsession and throwing that terrible dream in the trash.

 

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“They were just political props, thrown into danger for a photo op in a foreign land.”

 

Inside the Canal Street ICE Raid

It was 3-something on Tuesday, Oct 21st. Diwali. It was my first ‘day off’ in weeks—the tail end of the fall event and nice weather tour crush. Weekends running around being a soccer coach for my kid’s team (technically I’m the waterboy and my wife is the coach). I’m the hype man, telling the kids how well they’re doing.

From giving 15 years of tours on Canal Street—in my prime, often 3, 4, occasionally 5 a week—I’ve learned to project my voice, weaving with tourists and teaching them how to respectfully interact with the street without getting run over.

Canal Street—the center of the city. A World’s Fair of an avenue exploring the wonders of diversity. Canal Street divides the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, and Tribeca; the hand-carved old Tenements and now-opulent Cast-Iron factory buildings and their luxury goods and apartments; and the last remaining sweatshop buildings, their inhabitants sewing dresses for the luxury stores close by.

Perhaps Canal Street sews it all together. The street, often ‘exposed’ and derided by the right-wing New York Post to propagandize the dangers of New York to those who barely spend any time here. It is where I feel most alive; an artery of culture, old and new, poor and rich, real and fake, tourists and fast walkers.

(Pearl Paint right after purchase, 2014).

The pollution and smells of the old waterways have been replaced by the pollution and smells of the most frenetic traffic in New York, a truck route traversing the city from the Manhattan Bridge to the Holland Tunnel, the noise desperately holding the Tribeca and SoHo luxury forces at bay; sort of.

$20,000 lofts above weed stores, fake goods, hip British clothing (with mustached 30-year-old salesmen with beautiful socks), and rubber manufacturers mix with a revolving door of streetwear and temporarily popular brands.

Great food; no-frills Chinatown bakeries near fancy restaurants and coffee shops in old renovated sweatshops. Hypebeast sneaker stores, Indian and Chinese-owned souvenir shops, Chinese fruit vendors and jewelers running out of the old Diamond District storefronts—one known as the Hip Hop Jeweler, A$AP Eva, owner of Popular Jewelry, her storefront lined with countless photos of her posing with famous rappers, musicians, and celebrities.

(Side note, if you want to know who most wants the sellers gone, look at the buildings. In 2014, Vornado Realty Trust purchased New York’s beloved Pearl Paint flagship building for $15 million. The building was New York’s art supply mecca, supplying the Abstract Expressionists, Pop, and Punk artists, yet eventually bled out of business by Amazon. The apartments sold this year for around $3.7 million each, with the penthouse now renting for $20,000-a-month. In the building next door is a weed shop—rules for thee, not for me.

New York’s bazaar. The fake goods draw people from all over, many taking public transit, others taxis, and some driving in their large Ford trucks and leaning out of the safety of their obnoxiously high windows.

Anyway, I digress—my legs were sore as shit—and I was working out of bed on my laptop when I saw a Bluesky post about a raid happening… at rush hour. That is idiotic, I thought. I doubled back and looked at the time of the post, 12 minutes ago. Holy shit.

I grabbed my tour guide camera and batteries. My professional cameras were all packed, and I kind of wanted to use the small Fuji, the camera I’ve used to photograph the street since 2013 or so. But it’s not ideal for a provoked spontaneous protest by hungry-ass New Yorkers just getting off work, on a busy highway.

Now I would love to have conversations in the comments with anyone who has a different viewpoint on all of this, but please read in full before you do. I believe many of the ICE agents just need the money. I believe many are propagandized into believing they are currently helping make the city safer and that we’re being politicized to hate them. But the media was tipped off. This was clearly a stunt to provoke.

If you truly want to make changes to Canal, this is not the way. And who should you believe, a 43-year-old family man, NYC tour guide, and lifelong NYer, or a tabloid rag owned by an Australian oligarch (i.e. time to unfollow the NY Post).

I rushed to the subway and arrived by 4:15, just as the tides were turning and the crowd was growing. Amazing, seasoned news photographers and videographers were diving all over the busiest downtown artery in the city, dodging trucks, handsy ICE agents, and screaming New Yorkers. The formerly confident agents changed expressions quickly, the primary of whom wore a Yamaha hat and had a Norse pagan tattoo on his hand.

Norse mythology and symbolism were used to construct a pseudo-historical basis for Nazi ideology, adopted by Himmler’s SS. You fucking sent that dude to Canal Street at rush hour? You know how many lives were risked with that move?

Watch this moment.

Chants of ‘Shame’ permeated through the noise of the trucks. You can see the moment they realized they were just political props, thrown into danger for a photo op in a foreign land, surrounded by cars, trucks, and protestors. They gathered into a circle to avoid being separated into the crowd, a terrifying thought.

These agents might have thought this was a real mission, but they must have known on some level that it was for the media with all the cameras around at the beginning, showing off these poor Senegalese men making a living selling Christmas presents for the holiday season, disappeared for a low-level infraction—for the crime of being poor and black.

(My great-grandfather, who came to the East Side from Sicily in his 20s, also supported his family by selling shoes. Not too long ago the Italians and Irish were not considered White).

The agents carried an optimistic amount of zip ties, ultimately detaining 9 immigrants and 4 protestors, numbers of which the NYPD easily does any random Tuesday without causing this amount of danger. The NYPD looked pissed.

The ‘what do we do’ moment.

I mostly stayed to the edges. I didn’t want to get in the way of the news photographers doing their jobs. Those close shots were being recorded by countless people bouncing around like pinballs, so I didn’t feel like that would be too beneficial, especially with my slow camera.

I tried to capture overview photos to show a broad view of what was happening, occasionally running ahead to intersect the action to get some close photos. I riskily used a slower shutter speed in the dusk winter light, to create a little movement, but which in turn caused me to fuck up many of the photos. I’m happy with the decision, but wouldn’t have made it if I was a news photographer.

And I was a protestor too. As I said, my voice can project, and this was a time to speak to the agents one-to-one. Make them know that we see them. ‘I see you,’ I ‘said’ many times.‘If you don’t get out now this is a stain that cannot be removed. This is a stain on your soul.’ 

The business casual polka dots woman was an absolute legend, her bravery contagious. To see a hero in action in front of your eyes is quite a thing. She was brave, but I didn’t feel like I was brave because being brave involves being scared. The everyday New Yorkers weren’t scared in the slightest; they were fed up.

I personally didn’t see any protestors assaulting or infringing on the handsy agents, but you can watch the videos.

Some of the agents did not seem well-trained. This man above holding a shield was terrified and pushed a guy with a bike down. I had to yell ‘De-escalate’ to get him to freeze and walk away from the assault.

The backup armored vehicle arrived, only creating more commotion. The ICE agents would have returned much easier without having to make sure that the massive vehicle made it through, necessitating force on a few protestors.

Clearing the way in front of the NY Law & Order Supreme Court building, a perfect backdrop for a photo-op.

On the route that I give for my tours.

You could see the relief in the agents when they saw the FBI building. NYPD and about 20 ICE agents waited behind a barricaded area. I ran ahead of everyone to the pen to speak to the rest of the agents, who were unaware of the fear their comrades had just experienced. I projected, so it was unavoidable to hear.

“NEW YORK IS SAFE! NEW YORK IS SAFE! I’ve lived here for 43 years—my family, my kid live here—it’s SAFE! We don’t need you!”

Statistical source that New York City is a safe city, nearly recovered from the pandemic and NY Post-promoted crime bump—one of the safest cities in the U.S., even more so when you consider traffic deaths.

One of the agents verbally scoffed and made a ‘yeah right’ type joke to his fellow agents. The rest remained still. These people really believe the propaganda. This made me fiery and I yelled, ‘You think that’s fucking funny, with that stupid-ass smirk. This is my home, we don’t need you. We don’t want you. I SEE you!’ The agents all looked at each other unsure of what to do, conversed for a second, and retreated to the Federal Plaza Immigration Court building, leaving their teammates behind.

NYPD officers streamed past me into the barricade. I said, ‘excuse me,’ and they all gave me an ‘It’s okay,’ and a ‘no worries,’ politely hinting that they also didn’t approve of the operation.

The above agent was one of the most terrified and aggressive, and I saw him push multiple people. It must be quite the scary experience being the largest and most visible of the agents in the crowd. Here he finally made it to the barricades, protestor in hands, when he suddenly saw me there with my camera up. You can see a guilty expression in his posture and suprised Oakley covered eyes. Or at least that’s how I interpret this look.

Here’s the moment when the remaining ice agents coalesced to retreat behind the barricades.

The backup returned after realizing they had left their teammates behind.

They are certainly not going away, but I wonder if they’ll go back into Canal in the near future. They were shook.

 

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(*Read to the end for an interesting NYC story)

 

Introducing the JM-Proto1

Sorry for the Hype’d email title. Although not really. The funny thing about this project is that I can go to the extreme with the marketing and it’s part of the idea. It’s fun to write like a marketer, especially when you have an excuse.

Also as part of the project, I have to become a sneaker seller (Thankfully  I need to raise a little money as well).

Reserve the JM-Proto1 & print

 

Meet the JM Proto1, a single sneaker sculpture in Men’s 10. The sneaker comes with a complementary 7×9 inch print (which I’ll show below), meant to be displayed together. This shoe is for your shelf and not for your feet.

This is the prototype—ordered before the tariffs. I have 37 sneakers for sale, 15 of those are spoken for (*if you’re a part of the yearly print deal, expect to get one soon.) They are modeled after the Nike Panda Dunk, the most popular fashion item in New York City over the last five years, inspiring waves of rival brand and fake knockoffs. The sneakers were produced in Putian, China’s “Sneaker City,” and are the same (or perhaps better) quality than the Pandas.

I have (almost) trademarked my signature, which is stiched into the sole. The white leather is printed with details from an 1870s map of the project area.

I then painted the soles with silvery stainless steel paint. As Crazy Eddie once probably said, “I should charge more, it’s a lot of work, but my wife will bust my ass if these don’t leave the house.”

I always wanted to be a painter, but alas this may be as far as I get.

 

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About the print options:

1. Canal Street Pavement (2023).

This is right off Cortlandt alley near Broadway where the fake goods sellers primarily congregate. Looks a bit like crop circles.

1. Nike Panda Dunk, Prince and Broadway (2023).

This photo has a cool story. On the bottom right, the interesting black spaceman shoes belong to Richie, an outgoing renaissance downtown artist and native; a man who can talk. Super kind, occasionally says things that make me feel a bit uncomfortable. A spirited, talented artist, a musician, a friend who knows everyone in the neighborhood. He’s what this city is all about, and I’ll share an interview we did for the project in the future. Say hi if you see him and buy some art.

Richie has a photographers ability to notice details, I think better than me. The speed and training of watching and selling on that insane corner for hours on end is something else entirely. A master salesman with an unobtrusive, playful approach—it is jaw-dropping watching him chat up tourists in multiple languages.

I stop and say to Richie, “Man, I really need a hero photograph of the Panda Dunks, since I’m doing that part of the book on the sneakers.” Immediately he notices a Panda Dunk and bellows something in a deep voice to the man, who freezes. Everyone on the corner paused for a second, and this was that moment.

It’s just one of those photos where the cosmos align. I think to myself that it doesn’t make sense how that just happened. Or maybe it does because 1/10 people in SoHo were wearing those sneakers.

In the middle of the photo, next to the Panda, is Ken Hiratsuka’s 1984 sidewalk carving. On the left is someone wearing the then $1,500 Travis Scott’s with $600 Off-White track pants. (Can you imagine how bonkers my Instagram feed was while doing this research?

“The Air Jordan 1 Off-White “Chicago”, released in November 2017 as part of Virgil Abloh’s landmark “The Ten” collection with Nike, is a deconstructed reinterpretation of the iconic 1985 “Chicago” colorway. Combining classic Jordan heritage with Off-White’s industrial design language, it features exposed foam, stitched-on Swooshes, bold “AIR” and Off-White branding, and the signature red zip tie. This collaboration became a cultural phenomenon, redefining modern sneaker design and achieving grail status in the resale market, where it regularly commands prices well above $5,000.”

This was taken near the tail end of the sneaker craze, my favorite sneaker sighting. If he had kept these in a box they would be worth a fortune but he wore them through the bubble and continued to stitch them and make them more beautiful.

*Jordans are actually terrible for playing basketball in.

The black boots belong to this woman, promoting her Instagram handle. And there’s also a pair of New Balance sneakers, which is funny because for my entire life the company made dad shoes, until I became a dad and then the kids adopted it ironically and the brand became cool. So basically, I’ll never own a pair of New Balances.

Mix of real and fake.

 

Reserve the JM-Proto1 & print

 

Upcoming Classes *Stay tuned   Upcoming Workshops *(reply) October 17th Downtown, 10:30am-3:30pm (1/5 remaining, $225). Sign up.

 

Interviews

If you’re close to the LES in the next 10 days, I’d suggest checking out Aaron Stern’s curated show at Abri Mars on 53a Stanton (ends Oct 25th). Check out the video, Aaron has a wonderful community formula and the show is beautiful and accessible, with many small photographs that would sing on the walls of small city rooms. Aaron has a great occasionally sent newsletter as well, which you’ll enjoy if you like mine.

My dorky tour guide gallery crawl suggestion:

• Start the day at McSorley’s (opens at noon) with a couple small beers.
• Go to Dashwood Projects (maybe stop at Dashwood Books and buy a zine and a bag, or a book if you want to add some strength training to the day).
• Hit up Stern’s show at Abri Mars.
• Check out the show at Baxter St (Camera Club of New York).
• Optional: stop at Russ & Daughters for (obviously) a bialy, cream cheese, and lox—called the classic; #1 best meal in New York—or stop later in the day at the Essex Market food court for an easy but slightly less spectacular lunch.
• Finish the day at the ICP (new show opens the 16th). Attempt to resist buying a book.

 

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