Vantage Points
Picturing Strangers: Street Portraiture, Connection, and Photography
with James Prochnik, Olga Ginzburg, and Scott Rossi
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Making street portraits of strangers can be one of the most intimidating yet rewarding types of photography you will ever try. In this presentation photographers Olga Ginzburg and Scott Rossi share their stories about how they started making street portraits of strangers, how they quickly build connections with strangers to make pictures, and how street portraiture has become a vital part of their personal work and professional practice.
This free talk is co-presented by NYC Photo Community and StrudelmediaLive and was curated by moderator James Prochnik.
Watch the recording of this talk
Olga Ginzburg is a Belarusian-American photographer based in New York City. With an interest in open-ended narrative and its potential for subtle and layered meaning, her work explores notions of place, identity, home, community, and biculturalism. Olga graduated from the City College of New York, and her work has twice been included in the Triennial of Staten Island Photography at the Alice Austen House Museum (2019 and 2023). Since 2019, Olga’s work has appeared regularly in The New York Times and other leading news outlets and has been featured on ABC’s Eyewitness News 7 in New York City.
olgaginzburg.com
Scott Rossi is a photographer based in New York who is originally from Canada. His work captures the poetic nuances of daily life and the complex relationship between people and their environment. Rossi is a Documentary Practices and Visual Journalism program graduate from the International Center of Photography (ICP) and holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Victoria. Following his move to New York City in 2020, he began his project, Common Place, a visual meditation on Central Park, resulting in his first monograph. His work has been featured in or commissioned by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue, and the British Journal of Photography, among others. He has exhibited internationally at the Rotterdam Photo Festival, The International Center of Photography, and Photo 2022 in Melbourne.
Scott teaches photographing strangers for StrudelmediaLive.
James Prochnik is a Brooklyn-based photographer who uses photography as a means to explore the world outside, focusing on people, place, memory and the poetry of the everyday. His photographs have been published in The New York Times, Vice Media, Lenscratch, USA Today, and Shots Magazine and have been exhibited in galleries around the country. In 2019, James launched NYC Photo Community — a weekly newsletter listing photography events, workshops, exhibitions, and opportunities for photographers everywhere. James has been a regular guest lecturer on ethics and aesthetics in street photography at the University of Vermont.
James teaches street photography, poems and pictures, richness of light, and more for StrudelmediaLive.
