Looking Through – New York Series

Photographs by Jason Torres

 

For more than two decades, I’ve been photographing people and places across New York, from the Bronx and Brooklyn, to small Upstate towns and city streets. Working mostly with old film cameras from the 1920s through the 1950s, I spend hours walking, talking, and waiting for a specific moment to appear. Each portrait begins with a conversation, and every landscape carries traces of the people who move through it.

My practice moves between portraiture and landscape. What I see as the social and environmental sides of the same story. Every image comes from time spent being present, observing, and allowing a scene to unfold. The slow, deliberate process of film; loading the camera, taking a light meter reading, going under the dark cloth, focusing, changes the rhythm of seeing. It invites patience, trust, and authenticity.

Photography, for me, is a dialogue with humanity. I’ve approached hundreds of people over the years. Sometimes we talk for a while, sometimes we exchange only a nod but each encounter leaves a mark. Trust plays a quiet but essential role. You can see it in someone’s eyes, in the way they settle into their surroundings once the camera is there.

This work is rooted in anthropology as much as art. It’s a long form study of life, place, and human connection, an evolving archive built from countless small moments. Though I’ve photographed in Puerto Rico and all across Europe, New York remains at the center. It’s both subject and collaborator:  a landscape of constant change, history, and resilience.

I’m drawn to those quiet spaces where time and atmosphere meet the corner of a building, a stretch of road, the way shadows move through a neighborhood. Every image is part of a larger mosaic, unfinished, shifting a portrait of our generation seen through conversation and time. It’s about seeing one another. It’s about life.