Pål Hansen's series, One Day In Brooklyn, captures the sights and characters of New York.
In February 2017 Pål Hansen travelled to New York to promote his work. He had a week filled with appointments, everyday, apart for one, Thursday 02 February. It was Hansen’s first time in New York, but instead of using the day off to cruise the sights, he went out, camera in hand and decided to walk the streets of Brooklyn to photograph the real New Yorkers. That day Pål walked approximately 14 miles in 12 hours, searching for characters that, to him, showed the face of Brooklyn. This series of portraits is a part of a collection of faces that Pål managed to photograph that day. The one thing all the subjects have in common, despite age, gender and colour of their skin, is that they are all un-mistakingly New Yorkers.
Pål is used to working with short time frames, but often his work is tied in with editorial or commercial concepts. This work was a way for him to remove himself from the restraints that come with his commissioned work and focus just on the relationship between the photographer and subject, characters that the photographer finds interesting as well and the image composition.
The selection of portraits is also about the “exotic eye”; how a stranger is able to capture the character of a place and its people in a different way than perhaps someone who is used the the environment from before.
