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Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
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Photography Culture

NY Diary: The City in Glorious, Raw, Gritty Black and White

Chris Gampat
No Comments
04/24/2017
2 Mins read
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All images by Federico Chiesa. Used with Creative Commons Permission.

When you think about a lot of the more famous photos of NYC, it’s easy to bring to mind the grit that you’ve known about it. That’s what Federico Chiesa seems to be conveying in his series, NY Diary. While toting along his Leica M9 and a Voigtlander 25mm lens, he documented a lot of happenings in the city while on a trip here.

Many of his images convey the emotions of people and are a play on various factors within a scene. These factors and elements are only brought together better using black and white.

The people in Federico’s work are folks in typically some sort of weird, perplexing, or tough situation. It’s easy to feel for the woman sitting alone in the bar depending on your background and age–but it’s also interesting to see the contrast of the gritty city with some of the more well dressed and polished professionals walking about.

In fact, these characters are really at the center of Federico’s street photography. While some photographers try to look for lines, contrast, lighting, and shadows to tell a story, Federico seems to instead just focus on the people that all these crazy things are happening to.

Very few of them seem happy or like they’ve got a cheery story to tell. Despite these folks not seeming to be in any sort of homelessness or truly awful state, NY Diary is surely a documentation of the fact that all these people truly do have some sort of problems. When you think about this from the standpoint of a documentarian you can consider it to be a personal style but also as documenting someone who puts up an emotion that grabs you. Considering how intense NY’ers are, it makes sense.

black and white Federico Chiesa gritty images leica m9 ny diary nyc Voigtländer
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Chris Gampat

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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