The Second Maastrichtian

2008–2009

Shot on a two-megapixel BlackBerry Curve during the fall of 2008 and winter of 2009, The Second Maastrichtian occupies a hinge moment in New York City where horizontal and tangible life was about to stop living, and everything would soon go behind glass and vertical.

The App Store was only months old. Android had just arrived. The internet was beginning to crawl it’s way out of the desktop and into our pockets, but it had not yet reorganized the way we moved through the world.

Culture still existed in a touchable, breathable, drinkable world. Fashion largely happened in person or in print. Art lived in galleries and on walls. Messages were written on poles, doors and sidewalks. The city was our only feed and we found things because our bodies took us to the trough.

Street and institution lived on the same blocks in an unresolved cultural turf war: vulgar, intellectual, aspirational, commercial, erotic and absurd. The feed lacked community guidelines.

The city was still absorbing the newly minted 2008 financial crisis while another rupture was quietly arriving from the west coast.

The photographs did not know they were documenting an ending, and neither did I.

The original files no longer survive. What remains has passed through obsolete hardware, digital transfer, compression and time.

Like the world inside them, they survived the best they could.