Kason Campbell

Among the photographers in this project, Kason’s work demonstrated most his fearlessness of putting the camera in the face of a subject and interrogating inequality through the human as opposed to the architectural.

Two of Kason’s photos selected for this project in particular speak to this. They capture an unidentified person laying down in the passageway of an entrance to the Subway station at Port Authority/Times Square. Other passengers float in and out the station while the unidentified subject stays on the ground. This photo is reminiscent of something straight from Jacob Riis in the unflinching portrait it makes of someone clearly down on their luck.

During April 2024 when we shot a lot of this project there were nearly 40k new people looking for a place to sleep coming into NYC’s Department of Homeless Services, Health+Hospitals facilities and other facilities. Many of these arrivals are asylum seekers from other countries. Oftentimes they are unseen by those around them in the city, In a way I want to push Kason’s photo further; it would be amazing if they had captured a profile of the person laying down as well to tell more of a narrative, however I can tell just by the look of things this was a photo made in the passing of a few moments.

Elsewhere Kason also exemplifies what I would describe as fearlessness with the camera. It’s a photo of a police officer watching a subway turnstile. The copy in the photo is looking away from the camera’s eyes, towards some unknown other subject. Maybe someone was doing something in the station this was at? Whatever the case may be, this image was powerful because it speaks to themes of structural disinvestment found elsewhere in this project. In 2024 in particular, NYS invested in hyper-policing the poor and middle classes by hunkering state guardsmen at subway stations across the city. This happened in the midst of Governor Kathy Hochul’s now infamous rejection of Congestion Pricing, a policy that would actually support the system and the people that ride it. `