Danish artist Peter Funch placed these confines on his 9-year project ‘42nd and Vanderbilt’. Narrowing the infinite opportunities NYC has to offer an artist, Funch brings to the surface the minutiae contained within a fragment of our daily routine, the short walk from Point A to Point B, reminding us that the practice of photography in general, and street photography especially, has only scratched the surface of possibilities.

Through categorical editing – equally intuitive and scientific – human patterns and mannerisms, normally glossed over, become meditations on time, mortality, public and private space, the economy, and our inner selves. Funch employs a method that novelist Douglas Coupland aptly describes in the book’s afterword, accompanying the project, as “a kinder, gentler kind of surveillance.”

In one example, what appears to be a diptych of a woman, images taken only seconds apart, slowly becomes a “Spot the Difference” puzzle: subtle variations in attire, hair, light and shadow emerge as we realize, in both wonder and consternation, that the images were in fact taken days, months, or even years apart. This simple and effective mechanism employed by Funch permeates the ordinary with the extraordinary. The fact that our own unconscious tendencies, together with the rhythms and denizens of the surrounding ecosystem, can endure and replay over a path travelled thousands of times becoming akin to performance, is nothing short of a revelation.

New York City has always been pivotal to Peter Funch’s practice, from his final project at the Danish School of Photo Journalism Crossing Red Town, an immersive trip through Chinatown, to After 9/11 a series of strong, empathic portraits created in the wake of the attack, to his massive and genre expanding Babel Tales project, created over the 13 years Funch was an inhabitant of the city. From the outset of the creation of 42nd and Vanderbilt it has been Funch’s wish, or rather a need, to bring the project home to NYC where it belongs. To the people and the city that is at the core of 42nd and Vanderbilt. It is a great pleasure to present 63 works from the series for the first time in New York City at Paris Photo, New York.