ICP Teen Academy
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Leo Roiphe
In 2024, I was in a street photography class at the International Center of Photography. Our teacher, Roy Baizan, made us not only take street photographs but initiate conversations with our subjects and thereby try to integrate ourselves into the community— in his words, start “chopping it up.” One day, I passed by the Muhlenberg Housing Development Fund Corporation on Atlantic Avenue, a single room occupancy affordable housing center very near to where I live. I asked the two men hanging out in front of it for a picture. The result was not only a photograph, but also a long conversation with the subject, a man and resident of the building named Victor.
I returned in fall of this year and found that Victor died recently. The two of us did not really know each other. We came from very different places and inhabited very different worlds. It speaks to the strange power of photography that we were able to glimpse each other and converse, however briefly. I began this project, documenting the community of residents hanging out in front of the HDFC, in honor of one of the things he told me during our conversation: he advised me to always, always talk to people that might seem or actually be completely different. The basis of this project was my fascination with both incongruities and links between people and the ways these either unite or separate, which I feel is especially relevant in our world’s current climate of division and loneliness. The camera was simply a passport into the lives of these people, a means of conversation and connection. I wanted to form and document this routine of simply walking by and becoming a passing presence in the lives of these people who are connected to me, however tenuous that connection may seem, however impossibly different we may be.
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