Gus Powell: The Company of Strangers

Inspired by Frank O’Hara’s 1964 book Lunch Poems, photographer Gus Powell, who worked for four years as picture editor at the New Yorker, would spend his own lunch hours wandering midtown Manhattan making poetry. The resulting book of street photography, featuring photographs from his series Lunch Pictures, feels both romantic/nostalgic, and strikingly contemporary. Powell’s attention to the choreography of pedestrians is remarkable, as is his rendering of midtown light, refracted by office buildings and glass.