Anthony Fieldman

The homeless have only one thing in common: they lack a home. Some have fallen on hard times; others are mentally ill; yet more are ill-equipped for change, when it comes; and another group protests “the system”. I photograph the homeless quite often. Some people take offense, assuming my intentions are impure. Not so. I photograph people who feel invisible to make them more visible; to remind anyone willing to look, or conjure a smile, or a kind word, or stop and acknowledge them, that they are worthwhile, whether or not they are suffering. I befriended one such woman who appears in this collection, Diane. She could always be found at Grand Central Station knitting clothing for pets, while her cat, Buttercup, looked on. I visited her every week with my daughter for a year until she disappeared, buying her coffee, water, paying her for clothing I didn’t need to because I didn’t have a pet but making her feel as though she earned it, and it wasn’t a handout. She half-reintegrated, eventually, finding her way to Rhode Island. Occasionally, I get an email or a FB shout-out from her. These things, I tell myself, help her “normalize”. So, whether it’s Zaaa, the Kabuki-clad woman who also inhabits Grand Central, or Prince Hosea ben Judah, the Rastafarian, djembe-playing man who was pushed onto a subway track, and lost a leg and two fingers in the process, yes: I photograph the homeless, to remind myself that but for a turn of luck, we could be one another.

Statement

Ontario is a flat, featureless place, but for countless lakes to which Torontonians flock during the summer season. It is not particularly memorable. With that said, winter is fierce, and long. When it arrives, it stays. Outside of urban areas, that means the province is blanketed with deep snow, for 6 to 8 months of each year. When Ontario turns white, it becomes magical.

During the pandemic, rural Ontario’s wide-open spaces were a welcome reprieve from the stresses caused by an especially punishing and protracted provincial lockdown.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

Giants have stood here since the time of the pyramids and the druids. They are otherworldly: beyond human scale and time. And yet, we have whittled away at them relentlessly, turning primordial forests into firetraps, and decimating them to feed our endless hunger for fuel and shelter.

The California coast is unlike any other.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

It’s been called a Second Civil Rights Movement. Though less transformative, thus far, it is, by some measure, broader than the protests that led to the landmark July 2, 1964 passing of the Civil Rights Act.

A rainbow of human beings have coalesced in the streets to say, “Enough!”

It has been exhilarating to watch, and to participate.

There is much more to do.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

Fueled by waves of outrage and protest alike—Black Lives Matter, and the 2020 election—New York City, the largest retail market in the nation, has twice been turned into a plywood ghost town, this year.

Lumber resellers ran out of plywood, as retailers raced to board up their storefronts in advance of the threat of riots there.

Another thing happened on the way to transforming NYC’s legendary streetscapes: the public realm transformed at night, while young and poor alike flooded the streets, no longer cowed by the rising prices of consumerism and those who work to sanitize their economic engines.

The plywood ghost town was born.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

The greatest experiment in post-consumerist, human-powered, virtue-and-ethics-governed community-building the world, Burning Man is a 75,000-strong city that emerges in days, lasts a week, and evaporates into the ether once again.

There is nothing like it on Earth. It is the single most life-affirming experience I have ever had. It is an event and a place that renews faith in the inherent goodness of human beings.

At Burning Man, all are welcome.

It is, for good reason, being widely studied as a model to inform our civilizational evolution away from competition and warfare, toward inclusivity and co-creation.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

To travel in Israel or Jordan is to journey back in time to the origins of the Abrahamic religions, and our early experiments in civilization.

It is a cacophony of sights and sounds; a palimpsest of past empires and cultures.

It is ground zero for a large part of human history, claimed as such by half of the human race.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

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Statement

Every once in a while, a singular object becomes a magnet for our imagination and our pilgrimage. The Vessel, by Thomas Heatherwick, is one such magnet.

A singularly Escheresque, Piranesian and parallax-inducing attraction, it is a Moebius Strip on steroids—a playground for adults and children alike.

It is reminiscent of the great Indian step wells of the 8th and 9th centuries, and is—in my view—a high water mark for art in the city.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

Ethiopia is at once the birthplace of humankind, the oldest nation in the world—dating to the 25th century BC—and the only nation in Africa never to be colonized, but for a five-year period. Its native citizens physically reflect a broad swath of the human genome.

It is also the sixth poorest nation on Earth, and feels as routed as it is ancient.

it is one of the most exciting places on the planet.

From Jews, to Arabs, to Christians and the animists of the Omo Valley, the rich tapestry of ethnicities, languages and histories that permeate the country are unlike anywhere else I’ve been, and among the most exquisite.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

In the Land of Fire and Ice, it is impossible not to navigate the bare-knuckled landscape and be cowed by its majesty.

Tectonically, Iceland is continuously being ripped apart, as half of it sits on each of two plates traveling in opposite directions. Volcanic eruptions are regular, and continually attempt in vain to “weld” a torn landmass back together.

Even the ice, deep in the glaciers, is blackened by past eruption-fueled meltwater, re-frozen.

It is, truly, a haunting landscape.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

The Land of the Inca, the Nazca and the Uros is ancient, and varied. The Amazon, the Sacred Valley, the Atacama, the Ballestras and Lake Titicaca bring you from the wettest place on Earth to the driest, and everything in between.

Reaching closer to the sky than most other places on the planet, the rich and historic nation fell to colonialism, like so many others, bringing incalculable losses of human life, richness, and culture.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

Toronto is the quintessential colonial-era town-turned metropolis: struggling for an identity in the wake of having decimated its historic fabric. It is a place at odds with itself: pre-industrial pockets of human scale being replaced as fast as finances will allow it, effectively showing its citizens that they are no longer master, but rather servants to economic development.

Evidence of this silent conflict—between man and money—is everywhere.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

The Cubans brim with energy, optimism and kindness. Perhaps this is what happens when commerce is blissfully absent; when the struggle to “get ahead” is moot, in a land that forces equality of a kind on everyone.

It’s worth considering.

In any event, the Cubans are life-affirming in their daily acts: playing dominoes or soccer (futbol), horsing around or growing tobacco in the fields.

To wander through Havana’s streets or Viñales’ plantations is to encounter a rare breed of human: free of the ills against which the West struggles, and which poisons its consumption-governed soul.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

My love affair with New York is complex. My second home for 46 years, and my first one for 27 of them, it is both the people and the place itself that has captivated me for more than half of my life.

My love letter to the city’s residents is called “The Color of New York”, and is also on this website. My ode to the structures themselves—ones that by and large define the image people around the world hold in their heads—is contained in part here.

I spent two years traveling the city to find hidden resident transplants from cultures across the globe. With one eye always kept on its architecture and infrastructure, this photo essay was the byproduct of that “half” of my wonder.

New York City is unlike any other place on Earth, and represents the acme, in my view, of what is possible when total strangers coalesce, and not only tolerate one another, but collaborate, and bond.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Project Thesis

New York City is one of the world’s most diverse cities, where over 800 languages are spoken, and whose schools teach students hailing from over 190 countries.

And yet, when most people think of New York City, it begins and ends mostly with well-worn centers of tourism and media: Rockefeller Center; the Statue of Liberty; Broadway; Times Square; Wall Street... The truth is far more complex, and largely unknown to most residents and visitors.

The city is huge: over 300 square miles, over 5 non-contiguous boroughs, comprising countless enclaves whose residents rarely leave the place where their language and customs are shared. These are effectively cities within the city, and they are fascinating. With names like Little Liberia and Little Manila, these are but two among hundreds.

The photo essay’s title, The Color of New York, is an inherent paradox. There is no single color here. It is one of the globe’s most colorful places. Moreover, I chose to document life in black and white, since it felt both barer and more timeless, so I could focus on faces, textures, expressions and mood without color's distraction. 

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

I spent two years of my life in Tuscany, as a youth. Sadly, it was long before I picked up a camera in any serious way, and began the odyssey to discover the world through a lens.

I must return to document her properly, beyond the odd holiday.

Italy is the rare place on Earth where modernity, history and human-centered living all converge. It is a place of spectacular beauty—both manmade and natural. It is a place where craft and care permeate everything residents do: not because they are told to, or harbor ambitions of greatness (ancient Rome proved that point); but rather, because doing so improves outcomes for everyone.

Doing so makes life “just a little bit better”.

We could learn something from them.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

The North of Vietnam is exquisite. I went there primarily to find the indigenous tribes at the edge of the Chinese border—a people that doesn’t recognize national boundaries, focusing instead on a far more ancient delineation between people and their geography.

The karst mountains form a backdrop to these people: impossible verticality bursting from the ground toward the heavens, defining a place that has been carved by far greater forces than the hand of Man.

These people—the H'Mông, the Red and Black Dao tribes, the Tày, and the Giáy, among others—live a far simpler, slower lifestyle, rooted in community, reverence for the land and tradition.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

There is a good reason it is referred to as a sub-continent. India is unequaled in complexity, fueled by density, history and lifestyle. It is impossible not to be overwhelmed by sounds, sights and smells walking or driving through its landscape.

While I only explored one corner—Rajasthan—in this series, its villages and highways proved as active as towns and cities. From impromptu parades and festivities, to roadside attractions and vendors, to farming communities and of course ancient cities, temples and monuments, this piece of India was a non-stop feast for the senses.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com

Statement

I was first attacted to Burma—renamed Myanmar by the ruling military junta, and rejected by many Burmese—because of its tortured history. At the time that I went, it was the only country on Earth that was economically sanctioned by every other, apart from nearby, neutral Singapore.

That meant that there were no banks; no credit; no means of communicating easily with the outside; and accordingly, no tourism.

Walking through the streets of Mandalay or Yangon, or the archeological sites of Mingun and Bagan, or the mighty Irrawady River around which life in Burma thrives, I was blissfully ignored, but for my ‘otherness’. The citizens there hadn’t yet corrupted their relationships with outsiders. Elsewhere, tourists are seen as walking wallets. Not so in Burma. I was engaged, but mostly left alone, as I walked.

The most Buddhist country on Earth is also largely the most peaceful. But like anywhere else, there is corruption, mostly in the form of military and government.

Burma is an exquisite place full of beautiful humans.

© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.

For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthonyfieldman@me.com