Chris Maggio is a photographer living in New York City with 8.4 million of his closest friends. Working at the intersection of studio, street, and manipulated photography, his favorite images are the ones that ask far more questions than provide answers. As a former film editor, his emphasis is often on the story arc within a photograph’s frame, if not the series as a whole. Typically he can be found working in Midtown Manhattan and, given the opportunity, he’d really like to take your picture.
Hot as Hell in Midtown
I believe that in an age of increased awareness of how to “perform” in front of a lens, the idea of “documentary”, across all media, has become an increasingly evolving, malleable genre.
We currently live in a society where the validity of certain “truths” within media has ceased to be questioned: “reality television” describes programming where actual events are shaped under the manipulation of a production crew, and our personal profiles online are meticulously pruned and refined- yet we refuse to deem either of them fiction. I believe that photography should be granted this same license to engage in a type of ambiguity when documenting a subject. After all, photographic images have always had the ability to interpret reality, but are never able to fully replicate it- so why not play with that limitation?
Centered around the hottest day of the summer, my work documenting Midtown Manhattan engages in a style of street photography that mixes spontaneous, staged, and digitally manipulated compositions in an attempt to expand what is considered “documentary photography.” By extrapolating the everyday anomalies of the City’s reality, the work explores the common, summertime suffering of a diverse city in heat, as well as the falsely perceived feelings of anonymity in a heavily surveilled public space.
To view more of Chris’ work, please visit his website.