NEW YORK, NY — Returning to New York reminds me why I became a documentary photographer. Every visit feels like an education, not only in photography, but in myself.  

I feel about New York the way I feel about Paris. Its language resides somewhere in the back of my mind, furled up and quietly dormant when I am away. Each return awakens what I already knew, while adding a new vocabulary of feeling, memory, and understanding. I am constantly reorientated in a landscape whose geography I thought I knew.

This trip was especially meaningful. I explored the city with my family. I saw it through the eyes of my 19-year-old son, Connor. He is the same age I was when, in 1992, I first ventured out into the world on my own.  I boarded a Northwest jetway with triplicate carbon-copy paper ticket in hand, bound for Tunisia then onto Paris, wide open to whatever life might bring.

In that way, the trip felt unexpectedly full circle. I was traveling with my son at the threshold of his own adulthood while also reconnecting (quite spontaneously!) with the very people I met at that same age: two college roommates whose friendships have endured now 33 years.

Between conversations, laughter, and shared meals, I was reminded of something deeply comforting: the best relationships always pick up seeamlessly where they leave off.

The other thing about longterm friendships is that you never quite know where they’ll lead: sometimes into a new creative endeavor, sometimes into a new business relationship that will lead to many more returns to New York, and an unexpected thread leading toward collaboration with The New York Times.

New York is a place where I have loved, lost, hoped, grieved, and grown. Revisiting my old apartment brought with it a complicated tenderness: a quiet sorrow for the twenty-something girl who learned hard lessons about herself and others behind the closed door of apartment 1B.

It was a formative time. It was 9/11. I lost my sister only months earlier. I extricated myself from a seven-year relationship that should have ended six-and-a-half years before. An equally metamorphic relationship had just begun. Standing there again felt like meeting an earlier version of myself, this time with a self-compassion I did not have when I last walked through that door in 2003. As I stood in the quiet-carpeted hallway and extended my palm forward, I felt the heat still radiating through that heavy metal door, its half-life still not entirely spent.

Of course, I couldn’t come to New York without my [other] two favorite travel companions: Canon 5D bodies and hefty L-series 24-70 and 70-200 lenses. (My emotional support carry-on bags.) From the moment the plane circled to make its final descent into LaGuardia and the chiseled skyline stretched open beneath the airplane wing, the city offered herself up: steel bridges, layered architecture, quiet side streets, graffiti-covered walls, reflective subway escalators, and faces whose entire histories reveal themselves in a fleeting glance.

New York has been photographed endlessly. Still, she refuses to be exhausted. Every block holds another intersection of history, culture, ambition, struggle, and resilience.

Rather than chasing landmarks, I found myself drawn again to the people who give the city its pulse: strangers pausing at the 9/11 Memorial, conversations unfolding on sidewalks, workers hustling up another day's wage, and portraits made simply by slowing down long enough to notice and connect. Those moments matter more to me than postcard views.

New York also revealed its harder edge. Within steps of our SOHO hotel, I witnessed a man overdosing on the street and the world obviously flowing by. Steps further, I came upon the immediate aftermath of a shooting adjacent to a children's park so fresh the police were still unravelling the CAUTION tape. The following day, we passed through that same space only to be chased across the intersection by a frantically angry man who noticed me shooting the day before. He backed off only once my husband audibly dialed 911.

I set out to offer what I assumed any college-age kid would naturally want: the hippest, coolest, "vibey-est" bite of The Big Apple. I purposefully chose Ian Shrager's Public Hotel on the lower east side for its grit and artsy edge. Back in the day, hanging out at Schrager’s Library Bar at the Hudson Hotel felt like stepping inside a velvet-rope version of New York itself: dimly lit, overdesigned, obscenely priced, and impossibly cool. Sadly, Public did not live up to my hype. The futon mattress sagged. There was mold on the sink. We had to call twice for pillows and sheets. The neighborhood was rougher than I remembered. 

Or maybe, a 52-year-old former Studio 54 designer devotee and mildly apocalyptic 19-year-old see things differently. Connor, fully convinced I'd booked us in for a Robert Capa Conflict Zone Masterclass, at one point lamented, “Why couldn’t we just stay at the Midtown Marriott?” Turns out, the kid just wanted a clean lobby and waffle breakfast buffet. 

His was a fair question, though, and part of a larger truth: in New York, beauty and brutality exist on the same block. The city has always traded in extremes, but now the distance between who gets to sip $30 mules at the Central Park Boathouse and who survives on the pavement just outside the door is wider, sharper, and harder to ignore. (Sorry, Connor, mom wasn't going for Embedded War Correspondant cosplay. I promise.)

We also visited Ellis Island, where I found my grandmother’s name etched into a plaque. Evelyn Jean Burt arrived from Scotland in 1924 at age two as a first class passenger from Glasgow, Scotland, alongside my great-grandmother and her brother. My great grandfather found work alongside Henry Ford as a buyer at the Rouge Plant in Detroit two years before. All of them arrived here carrying little more than hope, uncertainty, and the possibility of becoming in a strange new land. As the nation approaches its 250th birthday, that visit felt less like a history lesson than a personal reckoning with origin, inheritance, and the fragile promises this country has made. It was a poignant moment for Connor, too: seeing his great-grandmother’s name among thousands of others, and understanding that our family’s American story began in this very place.

Trips like this remind me that documentary photography is not about collecting images. It's about remaining curious. Listening before pressing the shutter. Whether meeting lifelong friends, family, complete strangers . . . and even old ghosts, New York always extends the same invitation: look again, look closer. There is always another story beckoning your return.

Of course, I couldn’t come to New York without my [other] two favorite travel companions: Canon 5D bodies and hefty L-series 24-70 and 70-200 lenses. (My emotional support carry-on bags.) From the moment the plane circled to make its final descent into LaGuardia and the chiseled skyline stretched open beneath the airplane wing, the city offered herself up: steel bridges, layered architecture, quiet side streets, graffiti-covered walls, reflective subway escalators, and faces whose entire histories reveal themselves in a fleeting glance.

New York has been photographed endlessly. Still, she refuses to be exhausted. Every block holds another intersection of history, culture, ambition, struggle, and resilience.

Rather than chasing landmarks, I found myself drawn again to the people who give the city its pulse: strangers pausing at the 9/11 Memorial, conversations unfolding on sidewalks, workers hustling up another day's wage, and portraits made simply by slowing down long enough to notice and connect. Those moments matter more to me than postcard views.

New York also revealed its harder edge. Within steps of our SOHO hotel, I witnessed a man overdosing on the street and the world obviously flowing by. Steps further, I came upon the immediate aftermath of a shooting adjacent to a children's park so fresh the police were still unravelling the CAUTION tape. The following day, we passed through that same space only to be chased across the intersection by a frantically angry man who noticed me shooting the day before. He backed off only once my husband audibly dialed 911.

I set out to offer what I assumed any college-age kid would naturally want: the hippest, coolest, "vibey-est" bite of The Big Apple. I purposefully chose Ian Shrager's Public Hotel on the lower east side for its grit and artsy edge. Back in the day, hanging out at Schrager’s Library Bar at the Hudson Hotel felt like stepping inside a velvet-rope version of New York itself: dimly lit, overdesigned, obscenely priced, and impossibly cool. Sadly, Public did not live up to my hype. The futon mattress sagged. There was mold on the sink. We had to call twice for pillows and sheets. The neighborhood was rougher than I remembered. 

Or maybe, a 52-year-old former Studio 54 designer devotee and mildly apocalyptic 19-year-old see things differently. Connor, fully convinced I'd booked us in for a Robert Capa Conflict Zone Masterclass, at one point lamented, “Why couldn’t we just stay at the Midtown Marriott?” Turns out, the kid just wanted a clean lobby and waffle breakfast buffet.