Requiem to New York

Looking back over the photographs that he made of New York in 2020 Ashley Gilbertson wrote, ‘The resulting photo essay is my requiem to the New York that we knew before the pandemic, but also a love letter to the resilient people who never gave up.’ One of the leading photojournalists of his generation, Gilbertson has been recognised for his photographs in conflict zones, empathetic pictures of the global refugee crisis and his humanist approach to photography as a documentary medium. Born in Melbourne, Gilbertson has been based in New York City for more than twenty years, but the trajectory of his career has often taken him away from the city. One consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic was the shutting down of much of New York and the suspension of national and international travel, for Gilbertson, this enforced shift in his focus had a profound impact on his life and work.

Already a regular runner, his practice during 2020 involved daily distance running and, using the camera in his phone, photographing the events unfolding around him as he ran through the streets of the city. Gilbertson has referred to this body of work as a portrait of New York. Many of the photographs were posted on Instagram over the course of the year, accompanied by captions written by the artist. These visually powerful images, when seen together with the artists’ writing, have a diary like quality, telling the story of an individual, a city, and a country.

For the NGV, Gilbertson edited his extensive archive of images to a few hundred, and then a final selection of twenty-four photographs was made for the collection. These works are now presented at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia.