Photograph by Adam Pape

Image Title: Untitled (Hector)

Paper Dimensions (H x W): 21x16

Image Dimensions (H x W): 17.5x12.25

Year Created: 2021

Signed on the back and label

Image Description: I met Hector in front of Borough Hall in NYC, skating with his friends in late summer 2020. I asked him to stand for a portrait and I framed him with a rose blossom out of focus across his chest that became a soft pink blur expanding from his heart.

This photograph is part of a body of work featured in the Spring 2021 issue of Aperture Magazine. Noting the rose bushes planted throughout New York City's plazas and parks I created a botanical map of the city, an alternative geography. I juxtapose the architecture, infrastructure, and citizens of New York with these decorative blooms and cliché symbols, a symbol both for beauty but also for its threatening thorny armor.

Photographer's Bio: Adam Pape is a photographer based in New York City. He earned his MFA from Yale University. After moving to New York City in 2011 he began making pictures in Washington Heights and Inwood that became his first monograph, Dyckman Haze, subsequently featured in Le Monde Magazine, Photo District News, Dazed, Bookforum and other publications. The book was selected as a shortlist winner for the Paris Photo -Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2019. Pape is a Lecturer of Photography at SUNY/Purchase and works as an editorial photographer with commissions from The New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times, and Harper's Magazine.

https://www.adam-pape.com/