Beyond the lights of Times Square, the water around Ellis Island and the bridges in and out of Manhattan lies a view of New York that aren’t often seen on postcards or outside the work of 20-year-old photographer Miles Dixon. Dixon’s candid shots of bathers at Brighton Beach and high-rise inhabitants sharing lunch offer a glimpse of the real New York and wouldn’t be possible without his ease at aiming his lens at the unfamiliar.
None of my pictures are staged, and I never tell someone I’m taking their picture. I figure if I just take it they’ll either be okay with it, or they won’t; most people have bigger concerns than to care too much. I also find if you’re direct enough, and you don’t have anything to hide, then people won’t think you’re a creep. Either way you have to really want the moment. Someone usually forgets the few seconds of a picture being taken, but you won’t forget a missed opportunity.
When we asked the untrained photographer where he most liked to shoot in New York, he told us:
I don’t have a favorite place to shoot in the city, or at least not a constant one. For me it shifts. I bring my cameras everywhere, and whenever I feel like taking a shot, I do. Sometimes I find myself somewhere that I’ve already been, but for some reason it is completely new to me and much more interesting than the time before. Sometimes I don’t find anything interesting, so I just lean up against something and wait. This can go on for hours, but I always wait, and there’s never a time I don’t find something I like. My favorite thing is to walk to a place I’ve never been. Sometimes it’s 5 miles, sometimes it seems to be 5 feet from my apartment that I’ve never seen.
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