A black silhouette in the foreground, a colorful city behind. In New York, as in the major cities he travels through, photographer Eric Van Nynatten uses backlighting as a means of expression. His passersby have no faces: they are walls, signs, late afternoons.
In one of his images, a man walks into the foreground, his silhouette cast in shadow by the sun directly illuminating the facade behind him. In Chinatown, a turquoise wall stands out, framed by red bricks, crisscrossed by fire escapes, and studded with signs in Chinese characters. The walker remains anonymous. The city, on the other hand, reveals everything: its graffiti, its employment agency phone numbers, its fruit stalls at the foot of the buildings. Reversing the usual order of shots, pushing the subject back to highlight the setting, is one of Eric Van Nynatten's most recognizable touches.
This process isn't an effect, it's a vision. Having explored drawing and painting before photography, Van Nynatten discovered this medium at the age of 10 during family trips to Brazil. The digital camera in his hands was initially a way to capture what he saw passing by car windows. A year of solo travel in Australia and New Zealand in 2013 confirmed his passion. Upon moving to New York the following year, he turned almost naturally to street photography.
Everything about his work evokes cinema. “I like to imagine that my images are scenes from a film. I want the viewer to participate in the experience, to feel something ,” he says. He acknowledges a lineage through two masters of color photography, Ernst Haas and Fred Herzog, whose depictions of human streets resonate more through their hues than their explicit narratives. Following in their footsteps, Van Nynatten seeks less to tell a story than to compose: to find, in a metropolis, the light of a fleeting moment, and to connect it with a passerby, a wall, a staircase. “I am searching for a unique light; I tirelessly seek it in every metropolis I visit ,” he explains.
The result is as much a document as a poem. In a ferry terminal bathed in the golden light of evening, passengers seated on benches are transformed by the low sun into spectators in bleachers; the exit doors display "EXIT" in red letters against the horizon. Elsewhere, beneath a metal framework lit by a single yellow bulb, a small group converses in hushed tones, their backs to the street; in the background, an ochre facade unfolds like an empty stage. The subject is what the light reveals, and what it leaves hidden.
This style has found an audience far beyond the world of street photography . Van Nynatten has shot campaigns for Cartier, Adobe, Virgin Atlantic, Kate Spade, Assouline, Condé Nast Traveler , and Ritz-Carlton. His photographs have appeared in Vogue , GQ , and Kinfolk . The Art Directors Club of New York (New York ADC) has awarded him three prizes. He is entirely self-taught: no photography school, no studio, just a persistent attention to what happens between one hour and the next, between one light and the next.
The figures he lines up in front of cities are not anonymous out of spite, but by choice. They are silhouettes rather than portraits because he is interested in what transcends the individual: the gentle mass of a crowd at a standstill, the murmur of a changing neighborhood, the warmth of a late afternoon. The city colors what faces leave unsaid. This is how Eric Van Nynatten photographs those who inhabit it: without asking their names, by lending them the walls.
