What happens when street photography meets formal portraiture?
If the setting is New York City — 42nd and Broadway, to be exact — and if the photographer is Neil Selkirk, a transplanted New Yorker by way of England — the result is “1,000 on 42nd Street” [PowerHouse Books, $35], one of the most arresting, beautiful, and wonderfully bizarre, books of photographs I’ve ever seen. There is a sameness, and uniqueness, about the human face, which of course is why artists have been fascinated with it for millennia. Neil Selkirk, a commercial shooter who has traveled the world for big-ticket corporate clients, but whose first love is portraiture, is one such artist. I first met him more than 15 years ago at the Maine Photographic Workshops, where he taught a master class in location lighting. He taught me a ton about lighting, but he also gave me a terrific insight into how to work with people and to make great pictures of them. One lesson was to work fast — or at least to seem to work fast. If a corporate suit would bluster into a portrait session, sa
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