Bill Sullivan: Works

A friend of mine sent me a link to Bill Sullivan’s work, which is really quite interesting. He surreptitiously snaps photos of people in various locations to create some excellent visual collections. For example, he conceals a camera nearby where a confederate is drawing caricatures of people on the street. While the subjects (marks?) are sitting for their portraits, Sullivan clicks the shutter from just a few feet away, and apparently the subject is completely unaware.

The series that I like the best is the subway turnstile series. I’m really curious about the technical aspect of these shots, because here again, the subjects weren’t aware they were being photographed.

At the moment that the subjects passed through the turnstile, unknown to them, I took their picture stationed at a distance of eleven feet. I stood there turning pages of a magazine observing subjects out of the corner of my eye, waiting for only the moment when they pushed the turnstile bar to release the shutter.

These photographs strike home to me as a New Yorker – I see these people every day, but Sullivan has turned these everyday commuters into fashion and lifestyle models, brilliantly capturing one action shared by all of them every day. Great stuff.