As Far As I Can Tell

When I visited my brother in Philly last July we took the Chinatown bus into New York for a day to visit museums and galleries. It costs an amazingly low $10 one way for a two hour ride on a comfortable charter bus. Compare that to driving where you have to pay gas, tolls, and parking all day. The bus drops you in lower Manhattan a short walk from SoHo or the subway.

One of the shows we saw was an exhibition put on by the Brooklyn Institute of Contemporary Art at a gallery in the meatpacking district. I didn’t care for most of the work but the one artist that caught my eye was Mark Powell of Detroit, currently living in Mexico City. His street portraits of life in the Mexican metropolis really capture the uniqueness and personality of his subjects. Each one seems like a small clue to a strange and lengthly story.

After seeing an artist I like it’s normally fruitless trying to find online examples of their work. Not so with Powell, who has a huge collection of photographs on his Flickr account and adds new ones almost daily. He uploads at full resolution so every detail is visible and even publishes them under a Creative Commons license that allows for non-commercial usage. He recently created a catalog photoset that contains all the photos from the show I saw and more. The catalog photos are lower resolution but many are duplicated at highres further back in his photostream.