After grad school in 2013, photographer Elizabeth Bick found herself in the grind of New York City with barely any time for her own creative life. Amid this hectic routine, she started making pictures of the street life around her. She adhered to a strict methodology—setting up her camera and tripod inconspicuously between parked vehicles, creating a fixed frame for her views of passersby and then arranging the results into a grid.
Movement Studies Book Set (2016, 2017, 2018). Publisher: Roman Nvmerals
Her photographic work, collected in three volumes titled Movement Studies, mixes theatricality with naturalism to depict the pulsing human rhythm that animates NYC’s cityscape: pedestrians standing out against monochrome walls, along with signs and logos illuminated by dazzling New York light. As is evidenced by her photography, Bick’s vision is influenced by her training in modern and classical dance.
We caught up with Bick, who now splits her time between Brooklyn and teaching in Charleston, South Carolina, to find out why Midtown inspired her work and how the City works as a wellspring of both serendipity and structure.
How did you start photographing scenes of New York City?
Elizabeth Bick: I had just finished my MFA and was pounding the pavement as an aspiring artist and editorial photographer, taking meetings, trying to have a life and teaching at four different schools. I was burning the candle at both ends and trying to figure out a creative survival. I thought, I’m going to have to photograph while I’m on my way doing something else. I would just throw my camera in my bag with a really light tripod and make these pictures within the hustle of my busy schedule.
Did you think of any of the street photographers who came before you?
EB: I had learned about Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, the whole New York School of photography, while in college. There was always this fantasy of encountering these people walking down Fifth Avenue and having revelatory moments. But when I moved here, I tried it and thought, This isn’t really me. It’s too kind of messy, too loose. I needed some kind of structural thinking.
Movement Study II: 40.752200 -73.99342, 2018
What area of the City did you focus on?
EB: I’m a big fan of Midtown. Although I make work in other parts of the City, I find Midtown to be oddly mysterious. Everyone seems to be there with an intention that’s theirs and theirs alone. There’s a very strong sense of self-presentation by a lot of people walking through the streets. There’s so much construction, there are always new facades, but at the same time, there’s this kind of generic quality to Midtown that provides an interesting tension as a visual backdrop. I’m always leaning into the idea of a stage, a kind of artifice that exists already.
You were once very serious about dance.
EB: Yes, I was an aspiring professional dancer, ballet and modern, but mostly classical ballet. I didn’t have the right body type. There were many years of strict diets and body shaming. Making the work in Midtown helped me loosen up and accept the idea that any type of body, any type of age, any type of self-presentation can be theatrical and convincing as an arresting photograph. In grad school at Yale, I had started to investigate how photography and dance are, for me, inextricably connected. I was hiring performers and directing them on how to move in public, attempting to control the picture. But by doing that, I had sort of stripped the work so far down that I had sucked the life out of it. I had missed the unexpected unfolding of the world, the serendipity.
Movement Study I, Street Ballet, 2021
You divide this body of work into three parts. The first part, or Movement Study I: Street Ballet, arranges images of pedestrians at the same location into a grid of photos. Why the grid?
EB: The first thing that I locate is the stage, the backdrop, and then I consider how that would look in multiples. A lot of it has to do with the way that color and light move through the City, really piercing. There’s the composition of the single frame, and then there’s the composition of the grid, and I want them to be working together. When you review your photographs on the iPhone, they’re in a grid. I would think, Oh, this looks like something beyond itself. There was something about it that felt akin to the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, his studies of human locomotion. My use of the grid gives me a way to push against the idea of traditional street photography.
Movement Study I, Street Ballet, 2017
Movement Study I, Street Ballet. 2022
Movement Study I, Street Ballet, 2016
And then you started presenting the work in single frames, closer up?
EB: The series wound up as three separate books. The first part was me at the “back of the stage,” observing from a distance where there was no possibility of interaction between me and who was on the “stage.” I was very far away, and anonymous, and the people were anonymous, distant figures.
Changing to closer up was achieved with a different lens, rather than a change of your position?
EB: Yes, and I was off the tripod, doing handheld photography, but staying in the same place the whole time. The last image of Movement Study I is of a [scene] that I felt was so visually chaotic that it necessitated a single frame, on the corner across the street from Penn Station. I started to get closer and was thinking, “What if I start to analyze more the human expression and hand gestures and make single frames?” So, the first picture of Movement Study II is of that corner, but it becomes a single frame. It’s like being on the first row looking at the stage and really starting to see things like sweat and pores and wrinkles and stains on the shirt. And that corner, it’s also a light show when the sun is out. The bus moves and the light becomes black, and then the sun comes out, and it’s totally gorgeous. The backdrop, a construction site, kept shifting. It was a temporary facade, and people kept repainting it.
Movement Study II: 40.752200 -73.993422, 2017
Movement Study I, Street Ballet, 2018
Movement Study II: 40.752200 -73.99342, 2018
Movement Study II: 40.752200 -73.99342, 2018
And the third part?
EB: I decided that if I’m going to get closer and if the images are mimicking opera or dance, there must be a central character, so I decided to seek that person out on that corner. The last page of Movement Study II is a photograph of the person B Hawk before we actually even spoke. After I took that picture, I ran after them and ended up photographing them for over a year. We returned to their home where they lived with their mother. They were undergoing gender transition. Those photographs were about the presentation of self in private, and about collaboration, and about my relinquishing control almost completely, allowing the subject to have agency over how they wanted the book to be crafted. Then, to ensure that it felt operatic and not like an intimate narrative project, we returned to the location of the first grid, and the last page of Movement Study III is a photograph at the exact same location of the first grid in Movement Study I.
Movement Study III, Circling a Hawk, 2018
Movement Study III, Circling a Hawk, 2018
During the pandemic, you made a kind of coda to this project by photographing people in the street from your fourth-story window in Brooklyn.
EB: Yes, the studio, in an industrial area of East Williamsburg, overlooks the corner. During the pandemic, I started to think about how I could once again tap into the core principles of street photography but use spontaneous elements of the kind of performance that can occur in the street. I put out a call for anyone who wanted to participate, and the simple prompt of, “Please come to this street corner address, wear what you want, bring what you want, do what you want. All I request is that you look up at my window while I’m photographing.” I used a 400mm telephoto lens for the first time, and because of the intense focal length, the ground became a wall in the work and started to look almost like a studio set. There was a wonderful blending of control and chance, choreography, collaboration, estrangement, looking and being looked at, with the element of the street in play.
Windows and Mirrors, 2020–2021
Windows and Mirrors, 2020–2021
Now that you’re splitting your time between New York and Charleston, what do you miss the most about the City?
EB: The people. I’ve never met such wonderfully eccentric and brilliant minds. There are people here who are intellectually voracious, and culturally voracious, to an extent unlike anywhere else I’ve found in the US, or even in the world. Even though I teach outside of NYC, I maintain residence in Brooklyn and consider it home. In South Carolina, I am producing a body of work that mobilizes photography to expose the ways people perform identity within historic sites dating back to the Civil War—spaces where theatricality is embedded into the architecture, tradition and landscape in the Carolinas and surrounds.
Elizabeth Bick is an award-winning photographer with international museum exhibitions, residencies and critical recognition in The New York Times, The New Yorker and Time. She is a photography professor and holds a MFA from Yale.
Allen Frame is a photographer, writer, educator and curator based in New York, where he has had numerous solo shows with Gitterman Gallery. He has released four books of photography and is a winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. He teaches at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts and International Center of Photography.
