Cody Cutter has been photographing New York since 2017. He moved to the city at the end of 2018, dropped out of university convinced he would learn more on the street and in the studio than in a classroom, and has not stopped shooting since. Looking at his photographs, he seems to have been right.

His tool is a Leica M6 with a 28mm lens, flash on for every shoot over the past three years. The film is Ektachrome 100, colour slide film, with its technical limitations that Cutter does not simply endure but actively chooses: the slow shutter, the movement that bleeds into the frame, that visceral and slightly abrasive quality that immediately sets his work apart. A deliberate choice, not nostalgia.

His subject is the ordinary people of New York: older people above all, those who seem worn down by the city and by life, who carry with them a kind of silent knowingness about the world. A man in a tourist t-shirt staring straight into the lens on a Manhattan pavement. A woman with white hair turning as if she heard something. Close, frontal shots with no safety distance. Cutter steps into people’s space, knows it, and works to ensure that intrusion never tips into aggression.

He has been kicked, yelled at, spat on — and keeps going regardless. Because for him every shot is intentional, even when it is fast. He is not simply documenting New York; he is studying the people who inhabit it, one at a time, in the only moment he has.