In October of 2017, the photographer Jeff Mermelstein, who has been taking pictures of New York City street life since the early nineteen-eighties, was walking in midtown, on one of his near-daily shooting expeditions, when he encountered something he had never thought to capture before. “It was somewhere around Eighth Avenue and the mid-Forties,” Mermelstein told me from his home in Brooklyn, when I called him the other day. “I noticed that a woman was sitting there, tapping something out on her phone.” Operating on half-conscious instinct, as he often does when photographing, Mermelstein raised his own phone, went up to the woman, and took a picture, focussing not on her, as he might usually have done, but on the screen of her device. “She was doing a Google search, and it was something about wills, and a line came up about finding six thousand dollars in an attic. It was just a couple of lines there, but I suddenly felt, This could be the germ of a short story. It was a galvanizing moment.”
That picture, the first that Mermelstein made in which text took center stage, led him to begin pursuing a new body of work, which has been collected in the book “#nyc,” out now from Mack. In the book, Mermelstein, whose work is held by institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Public Library, presents a series of iPhone photographs that he took over the course of two and a half years, capturing the quotidian dramas taking place on the phone screens of unsuspecting strangers. Mermelstein frames the screens tightly. We can sometimes observe hints of the person who is texting—a chipped manicure, a ring, an edge of a coat sleeve. But it is in the featured text, rather than in these minor details, that the pictures’ curiosity resides.
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