Street Portraits by Michael Itkoff
Street Portraits consists of photographs taken in five cities around the world since 2002: London, Sydney, Hanoi, Bangkok, and New York. The project originated from a desire to subvert the artificial hierarchy created by celebrity photography and advertising.
Billions are spent every year in order to show us faces and products in clean controlled studio settings. In response to this, I took a large white board representing a studio or gallery wall and placed it behind ordinary people on the street.
While photographing in disparate urban settings, the white board became an equalizer - a negative space which united the subjects while also separating them from their specific contexts - similar to a passport photograph. Taken as a whole, the Street Portraits project is a meditation on humanity's essential and a celebration of the fact that we are all members of the same extended family.
Michael Itkoff lives and works in New York City.
To view more of Michael's work, please visit his website.
