I Built Indoor Domestic Scenes With Furniture That People Left On The Streets

Living in an overpopulated city like New York, indoor space is hard to come by and therefore quite expensive. Typically when a photographer builds a set, they will rent studio space. But to build a set, all you really need is a wall and a floor. So I had the epiphany that instead of paying for a studio space to build photo sets, I would just build them on the sidewalk.

In NYC, many people don’t own cars. As a result, when people move, many will just buy new furniture and start from scratch instead of bringing their furniture with them. This causes people to ultimately leave their old furniture on the street or give it away for free on Craigslist. I decided to capitalize on this and start using these gems as pieces for my photo sets.

I put these two ideas together – using unwanted furniture and building sets on sidewalks. When I first started on this project, Gozde Eker helped with set design. However now I do all the set design as well. I pursued this project in order to get people to question perspective. When people look at the cropped in images that I shoot on the street, people almost always think they are actually interiors. I think this idea gets people to recognize that when you’re looking at a smaller piece of a larger picture, you can often be mislead.

More info: setinthestreet.com

Bathroom Cropped

Bathroom Street

Christmas Cropped

Christmas Street

Times Square Cropped

Times Square Street

For this set, the Times Square Alliance invited me to build the set and it was not done guerrilla style like my previous ones.

Basement Cropped

Basement Street

Bedroom Cropped

Bedroom Street

Proposal Cropped

Proposal Street

Dining Room Cropped

Dining Room Street

Typewriter Cropped

Typewriter Street

After conducting my own photo-shoots for “Set In The Street”, I leave the sets up for a week for pedestrians to interact with

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