Chris Rock

Late afternoon in New York. Chris Rock crosses the city the way New Yorkers cross New York, briskly and without looking at the buildings he has known for decades. Ludwig Favre photographs him in that crossing, in the small intervals when a familiar face moves through a familiar place and is, for a few minutes, indistinguishable from the people around him. The Chris Rock portrait series records that ordinary passage: a sidewalk, a doorway, the way the light catches on the same brick he has probably stood in front of a thousand times before. New York treats its own this way. The city does not ask its comedians to perform on its streets; it allows them to be quiet. The full Chris Rock portrait sequence belongs to a tradition of New York street portraiture that the great photographers practiced from the 1950s onward, a study of public figures returned for a moment to the texture of the city that made them.

Light shapes the contours of each encounter, revealing subtle shifts in tonal relationships.

The rhythm of observation series by Ludwig Favre is available as a limited edition fine art print, signed and numbered.