A boat full of tigers #4

American/Swedish photographer Jesper Haynes was born in Edinburgh, Scotland 1962. His photographs are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, Sweden. He shares his time between New York (where he is based), Bangkok, Stockholm and Tokyo. Jesper Haynes gritty photographs of urban life are full of a raw energy that comes few and far between in this photography-barraged culture we exist in. Jesper was born in Edinburgh,Scotland in 1962 and spent his childhood in Stockholm. When he was 16 years old he met Andy Warhol in Stockholm who encouraged him to come and live in New York, once in New York he started working for Ralph Gibson printing in the darkroom for five years. Days where spent in the darkroom and nights at club Area while living in Larry Clark’s apartment on Hudson and Canal, “I never saw daylight”. Within his repertoire we of course see photographs of famous artists and luminaries from various times, including Warhol, Keith Haring, Allen Ginsberg, Willem Dafoe and more, but we also discover very telling and more personal images. These beautifully composed snapshots, always black & white, featuring his friends, their friends, roommates, lovers, people left over from parties and others that nobody knows how they got there, create the basis for an incredibly strong body of work. One early series shot over a 20-year period is titled St. Marks 1986-2006. For the photographs, he religiously documented the life in and around his apartment on St. Marks Place on Manhattans lower east side. Each and every image from St. Marks is infused with a rare creative energy at once raw, sexy, joyful, silly and highly personal. The works give a rare, unique and wonderful insight into the face of a rapidly changing city. Another book of his titled, Shibuya Scramble features a series of black & white street photographs of women pedestrians walking the famous crosswalk in Shibuya, Tokyo. However for these images, he has cropped his subjects from the waist down. We see no faces. Only legs and shoes. The list of wonderful projects goes on and on.