I’ve been a follower of Watching New York on Instagram for a while. Johnny Cirillo, the photographer, tracks sartorial people who walk along the streets of NY. And recently, he decided to make a book of his images. Please consider the following sentence to be something I never thought that I’d say in 2024. This book is a glorified Instagram post that feels simply like curation done by likes filtered through an algorithm. Unlike the Sartorialist before him, Johnny seems to be mostly capturing scenes with a telephoto lens. Of course, that’s not the truth as he speaks about his interactions with folks. But if you compare the two, there’s a much different style.
First off, I’m aware that folks are probably going to come for us. So know this: this review is a major critique of his book. Johnny Cirillo has got a legit background in photography and worked at studios. Plus he’s made it onto NBC and various other places because of the work he does for social media. And that’s the key here: the work is viral on social media first and foremost.
That’s not unlike Scott Schumann — who made it big because of his Sartorialist blog. But even so, Scott’s work had elegance and grace and got close to the people he photographed instead of simply just turning Broadway into a runway. After looking at Johnny’s book, I needed to check out Scott’s India book again. Perhaps this is the biggest issue that I have with the Watching New York book — that it came after the Sartorialist.
That’s why I say that this book feels like a glorified Instagram post.
- Johnny speaks to the stories of people. But we never quite see these folks ever make love back to the camera. That’s different from how the Sartorialist does things.
- Sometimes the people look like they have no life in them or like they’re simply tolerating being photographed.
- Johnny makes the street feel like a runway: which is what so many folks can do easily. And it checks out as he speaks about shooting with a 200mm lens. In today’s world, why bother to publish a book of something that anyone and everyone can make? Why not create your own signature style?
- Text color choices like yellow on lavender make it hard to read.
It perhaps also doesn’t help that all of the images are verticals — and so it’s evident that everything was made for Instagram first. However, that also means that none of the photos are split down the middle of the page — and that’s incredible. Cirillo also does an excellent job of showing off NY’s diversity far more than Scott has. But both of them seem to only stick to wealthier, gentrified neighborhoods.
How could this book been made better? Well, this book should’ve been physically larger to give each image more room and justice. Some of the images aren’t larger than what I see on my phone. And that’s possibly intentionally to hide traditional issues with photos. In fact, if you put a magnifying loupe to the paper, it starts to break apart. The point of making prints is to make them bigger, remove distractions, and to give us a reason to look at something beyond our phone.
The book feels very much not signature. Johnny is capturing instead of creating, and I’d like to see him create images and refine his craft instead of shooting just to pander to an Instagram algorithm.
We’re rating Watching New York, by Johnny Cirillo two out of five stars. We really hope he tries again.