New York, From the Outside In

Keiichi Nitta spent enough time in Terry Richardson’s orbit that the influence is hard to miss—the flat flash, the direct gaze, subjects who look like they know exactly what’s happening and have decided they’re completely fine with you watching. But Nitta has something Richardson doesn’t, which is the particular clarity of someone who chose New York rather than was born into it. The outsider sees the city differently; sometimes more honestly.

Bowery Boys—his first photobook, named after the old gang that claimed the Lower East Side—came out in April. Naked women, hard-looking men, a sensibility that’s half downtown sleaze and half something more precise and Japanese in its composition. It shouldn’t cohere, but it does. There’s a kind of intentionality to the transgression, which is rarer than it sounds.

I like work that knows exactly what it is. This knows exactly what it is.