I call, he answers. He is walking around Brooklyn, New York in the sunshine as we talk about his street photography, while I am sat in my kitchen in the UK, cold rain battering my windows. He laughs when I tell him I had to scrape frost from the windscreen of my car that morning and replies : “I am not ready for that.”
New York based Andre D Wagner is easy to speak with, he is serious, almost shy at times, but he does have a sense of humour I find engaging. At times the phone line dips, then gurgles before Andre returns to answer my questions.
“Nothing really,” is his modest reply when I ask what he is searching for when he works the streets. “I kind of let it happen naturally. I don’t really go out looking for a certain type of image. I try to be as open as possible, anything that grabs my attention I photograph. I always say I have a big appetite for photography, like I enjoy photographing, I like making pictures. I don’t really question it, I just shoot it.”
As a street photographer, Andre is much, much more than a look and shoot. Maybe he is reluctant to admit it, but his is a more considered flow.
Copyright © Andre Wagner
In one shot, a man in a baseball cap holds a placard asking people to ‘Accept the lord into your life’, while his friend in a flat cap looks on. There is the feeling of drama in this photograph, the taller of these two men has eyes that ‘shine’ – a feature of his demeanour that tells its own tale. He seems wary, bordering on the agitated. The photograph has great energy and there is a sense in which we feel that the men, somehow, are cornered and that someone out of shot is speaking to, and annoying, the larger man.
“I want to be surprised by the pictures,” Andre adds. “I don’t want to have pictures I know exactly what they are going to be. Because if I am surprised it means I am growing, I am trying new things.”
Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, Andre attended Buena Vista University in Iowa and graduated with a BA in Social Work. He travelled to New York to take his masters but he didn’t complete as photography became his work and life.
“Coming to New York,” he muses in the Brooklyn sunshine (I can only imagine at the other end of the line). “My whole world kind of turned upside down and I decided not to finish (his masters) and took up photography and it’s all history from there.”
The photographs have a vibrancy and a certain stolen moment charm to them. The lady puffing out her cheeks in exasperation as her (we presume) children trail behind her. The two maids or waitresses on a cigarette break by the telephone booth. These are people caught candidly and unaware in the everyday of the street.
Copyright © Andre Wagner
Life certainly has changed for the young man from the Cornhusker State. Now, he often works for the New York Times and has been commissioned to cover the visuals for several articles for the newspaper.
“Yeah,” He agrees. “There is a column that I contribute to called ‘The Look’ which…you know it is a lot of different styles, it is about culture and I contribute my street pictures. I do other assignments for them as well you know I make portraits of people.”
Most notable gallery from his portfolio of street photography is his work on the New York Underground – now available as a book ‘Here For The Ride’.
For three years as he travelled between Manhattan and Brooklyn on the J train he shot his fellow passengers as they made their way to and from work or school or college. The result was the aforementioned and aptly named ‘Here For The Ride’.
Copyright © Andre Wagner
“I was making a lot of pictures in the subway,” he explains. “I was moving back and forth to work everyday. At the time I was working in a studio, so I was working in New York…9 to 5. I remember during the wintertime, especially out here in New York, the sun goes down really early but there is not a lot of light during the day so by the time I would get off work I would never see…light. Outside there would be no light and I just wanted to be out on the street all day but that was impossible because I was working. So, naturally I just started making a lot of photographs like to and from work in the subway.”
The movement of people via the New York transit situation underground is symbolic. A representation of the invisible lives many people lead in big cities as they flit from point to point, rich, poor, white collar, blue collar. Strangers moving to and from beneath the radar, working their days, chipping away at their own gentle existence. In the darkness of the city above, far beneath the sidewalk in another kind of darkness people are migrating from one area of the city to another. Going about their business almost unnoticed by the vast majority of their fellow city dwellers. Andre Wagner has captured them in their black and white obscurity and shone, for a fleeting moment, a light on them.
Copyright © Andre Wagner
“There was this couple of images that I felt like, you know, were strong pictures,” He told me of the process. “Something started to happen and then that’s when I realised I could make something out of this because some of the images started to speak to me, that’s when I decided to be more targeted in the subway.”
Of course Wagner still works in film and develops his own prints, maybe because he ‘likes to be surprised’. It is his preferred option, working and making his photographs ‘hands on’
“I just stayed with 35 mm,” he offers, “Making my own prints and developing my own film in the darkroom it just satisfies me… personally, making my work and realising I could feel it all the way through. Black and white prints are just beautiful so I just operate in the way that makes me happy.”
There is a theme here and it is darkness, darkroom, underground, though, take note, he does work in colour when it is right contextually.
Here is someone pushing street photography’s edgy, dark existential, artistic and philosophical boundaries. His next project is, he reveals, likely to be centred around his new home in New York. I, for one, can’t wait.
Check out Andre’s work at andredwagner.com
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