Murakami in Her Bag, Anaïs Nin on Her Tongue

New York keeps making a certain kind of person—or maybe it keeps attracting them, it’s impossible to say which. Sylvia Elizabeth is one of them: she reads Haruki Murakami, she listens to Lykke Li, she quotes Anaïs Nin. In lesser hands that combination reads as a mood board rather than a personality, but somehow it doesn’t here. She posts her life—her paintings, her photographs, her friends—in soft floods of color, and you get the sense of someone genuinely building something, slowly, in the Brooklyn-to-Manhattan corridor.

Photographer Darren Ankenman visited her for Purple Fashion Magazine—Olivier Zahm’s erratic, frequently naked, and often genuinely interesting Paris journal—and the resulting shots have that quality of catching someone mid-thought rather than posing them. She’s on rocks, in a car, on a beach. The pictures feel like her life rather than a session.

Photographers like Sandy Kim and Ryan McGinley have spent years turning the downtown New York creative scene into an archive before it disappears, and Ankenman is working in that same tradition. Sylvia Elizabeth makes a good subject, which isn’t a given. She looks like she was already thinking something before the shutter fired.