Urban Fieldnotes: February 2015

I didn't stick around for much of New York Fashion Week this season. It was too bitterly cold, and it all felt a bit too cynically contrived. Dozens of photographers, once shooting quirky individuals for their own blogs, now take candid motion photographs of style stars making their way to runway shows to sell to Vogue, Elle, and PopSugar. We all get the same images of the same people. We all compose them similarly, with the same blurred out backgrounds, the same jagged crop jobs that cut off the head just above the bangs. And we all grumble under our breath about the all-too-predictable "circus" Fashion Week has become. We, of course, are entirely culpable in making it that way.

So for me, the best moments of Fashion Week are always when I escape the crowd of photographers, chart my own course, and photograph people outside the fashion in-crowd. That's what happened this season with the Hood By Air show. The crowd was headed up to Derek Lam after suffering the brutal chill of the sidewalks outside Victoria Beckham on Broadway in the Financial District. I chose to stick around, get some coffee, and head over to Wall Street for HBA instead. It was beautiful. Whole stretches of cobblestone to myself. Not another photographer in sight, as I stopped black-clad cool kids with shredded baggy clothes and big hair. Not one of them was famous. And then, the other photographers showed up: Adam, Nabile, the black crows of the sidewalks. It never quite escalated to Derek Lam madness, but it wasn't quite the same anymore either. Here is one of the images I got before the other photographers got there.