‘Legal aliens’ in New York

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An Englishman in New York

By Jason Bell with an introduction by Zoe Heller

I love New York – but while it is a great place to visit, I wouldn’t want to live there.  My wife, who was born and brought up in Manhattan but has chosen to spend almost all her adult life in London (and I don’t believe I am the only attraction here), clearly feels the same way.  New York is an energetic and exciting city, with wealth and glamour cheek-by-jowl with grime and squalor, rather like Victorian London, and it takes an unusual kind of person to want to settle there.   Jason Bell, an English photographer who has settled in New York, has produced a collection of 60 or so portraits of English ex-pats who have chosen to live there, some of whom are certainly out of the ordinary.

The portraits, some in black and white and others in colour, place their subjects in context although in some cases the context submerges the subject: a retail store executive in a shop-window is dwarfed by a mannequin with an afro-wig and partially concealed by the reflections of the street on the plate-glass; a mixologist almost disappears in the shadows of his bar; and the drug-dealer ‘Mr X’ is so keen to preserve his anonymity that he is barely identifiable on the fire-escape on which he is photographed.  There are more subjects in grimier locations than in glamorous ones – even the more well-known faces: Kate Winslet on a roof garden with chimneys and water towers crowding the background; Zoe Heller in a back alley; Simon Schama on the steps down into a subway station.

The subjects are not all models, actors and media personalities.  They are diverse: a policeman, a paramedic, a taxi-driver.  Nor are all the subjects individuals; there are siblings and business partners in some instances. Some of the subjects are clearly not permanent settlers in New York; some have multiple homes around the world or are self-acknowledged transatlantic commuters.  At least one of the subjects, whilst of British background, is not really ‘English’, having been born in California and brought up in Switzerland.  Nevertheless, this is a fascinating collection of characters with the portraits accompanied (alas, in a separate section at the end of the book) by interviews with the subjects about living in New York as well as why they live there.

The book itself is large and heavy – coffee-table sized (280mm x 335mm) as well as being a ‘coffee-table book’ – and thus unwieldy, unnecessarily so as the photographs occupy only a small proportion of the page set against much white space.  The interviews are set in a relatively small fount, which makes it a little hard to read in coffee-table mode and, as the book is rather heavy to hold close, I would have preferred a smaller and lighter format. Those gripes aside, the quality of the photographs and the melting-pot of people portrayed make this an unusual and enriching social document and well worth returning to time and again.

For those who would like to look before they buy, a selection of the portraits can be found on Jason Bell’s website.

An Englishman in New York by Jason Bell with an introduction by Zoe Heller, is published by Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2011. 156pp, 65 colour illus, £35.00 hardback. ISBN:978-1-904587-97-2