PDN’s 30. Our Choice of Photographers to Watch
Gus Powell

It was starting in 1956 that poet Frank O’Hara would skip out at noon from the Museum of Modern Art, grab a hamburger, and, riffing off the activity of New York City’s bustling Midtown, compose his famous “Lunch Poems.”

Forty-five years later, and just a few blocks away, photographer Gus Powell also realized that after a quick bacon cheeseburger he could be out in what O’Hara called “the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon,” using his lunchbreak and his camera to extract rich, intelligent, unpredictable and often funny scenarios from what he says are “not so incredible moments.”

A self-described city kid and self-taught photographer, Powell says he had always made pictures out in the street, but it wasn’t until he met Joel Meyerowitz through a mutual friend that he started taking the work more seriously. “Aside from his sheer enthusiasm, what Joel really turned me on to was paying attention to the entire plane of space out on the street, and making pictures that had an action quality…pictures that permit the viewer to discover them in the same way you discovered them on the street,” says Powell.

Powell’s street images will soon be published by J+L Books, which will be releasing the work as a collection titled In the Company of Strangers this spring. At the same time, he still hangs on to his day job in Manhattan as the freelance photo editor for the fiction section of The New Yorker. If looking at countless images a week provides him with a constant stream of inspiration, so do the streets themselves. While Powell says he’s been concentrating more on slower, more methodical landscape work, at the same time, he can’t keep off the pavement. “Today I shot two rolls on the street during lunch,” says Powell. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me next, but I really can’t stop making these pictures.”

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