All About Alana: Four Photographers, One Muse, Many New Yorks

A blonde woman raises a silver Pepsi can inside Katz's Delicatessen, a historic Lower East Side restaurant in New York, while diners eat behind her. The flash photo by Danielle Levitt is part of 'All About Alana,' a show curated by Ryan McGinley at Rectangle Room in the Lower East Side, with works by about 30 New York photographers who shot the actor, model and musician Alana Jessica Martin.

The exhibition opened on October 15 and runs through November 15.

One Muse, Four Cities

Levitt placed Martin in Katz's, which opened in 1888 and grew out of the area's Jewish immigrant food culture before becoming a tourist landmark through the 1989 film When Harry Met Sally... Her pose is clearly staged, yet the real customers keep eating around her.

Daniel Arnold shot Martin on a busy street, where passersby, signs and traffic lights crowd the frame and she never fully separates from them. Arnold's practice recalls the street photography of Helen Levitt, who photographed children on New York sidewalks in the 1930s and 1940s.

Matthew Sprout's black-and-white photo gathers young people around a car at night under harsh flash, echoing the night-time work of the press photographer Weegee, whose 1945 book Naked City documented the city after dark. Charles Caesar moved indoors, photographing Martin lying on white bedding with a corded microphone, turning a bedroom into a small stage.

Together the works blend the street-photo tradition of chance encounters with the deliberate staging of contemporary fashion photography.

Why It Matters

The show suggests that New York's culture lives in diners, sidewalks, parked cars and private rooms, not only in museums and venues. By photographing one person across these places, the artists turn the city's everyday spaces from backdrops into subjects.

Read the original article in Korean: K trendy NEWS