New York City 2017

Fast paced and everyone going places all the time, be it the morning rush hour, or people moving between bars, clubs or night shifts at 3am, the city has a rhythm that moves so quickly that you might feel like everything and everyone is rushing by and that the whole world is a blur. However, it's only once you've spent enough time walking the avenues, standing on street corners, sitting in one of its many parks or you have found yourself daydreaming on the subway, that you start beat-matching the 'chaos' in the city that never sleeps.

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The tempo becomes your soundtrack on the sidewalks and that beat carries you through your days. People shouting at taxis, people hustling to sell their watches from a suitcase at the corner, calling out so you can come into the store for an always “going out of business sale” or just screaming for you to get out of their way.

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You quickly learn to live with it, then embrace it, and if you’re unlucky and have to leave, or you made the unfortunate decision to head elsewhere, you miss it all. For at the heart of the chaos and noise, the hustle and turbulence, the designer suits and bags, the grifters and the buskers, lies inspiration. There lies the root of all the creativity. Every corner you turn, you find a dreamer starting from nothing. Every gallery you walk into, you see those dreams become tangible with ambitions for immortality.

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I wish I took more photos during my last visit there in 2017, the same a decade earlier when I lived there, or maybe I wish to return. 

When I look at these photos, I hear the taxis honking their horns, I hear the subway platform announcements at Broadway and 168th Street station, and maybe I still hear Coldplay’s Clocks playing from my discman in 2003.