Luc Kordas
The Poland-born photographer has captured stunning candids of New York for an upcoming book. Steve Fairclough discovers more…
INTERVIEW
Luc Kordas was born in Poland in 1984 and now lives in Brooklyn, New York City. He graduated with a master’s degree in Spanish Philology, and then taught English as a second language in Spain and England. He is a portrait, street, travel and documentary photographer and videographer who has been shooting the project ‘The New York Chronicles’ in all boroughs of New York City.
His street work is primarily candids, and tends to single out subjects in a crowd rather than putting many subjects in the frame. Kordas works almost exclusively in black and white and favours the use of wide apertures.
His work has been published by the Guardian, Lens Culture, Huffington Post and Al Jazeera, among others. He was also published every week in the legendary New York paper The Villlage Voice until it went paperless in 2017.
www.luckordas.com
Al though he hails from Poland, Luc Kordas has made his home in New York City since 2014. It was that same year that he began a long-term project, ‘The New York Chronicles’, photographing across all the boroughs of New
York City. The latest fruits of this visual storytelling endeavours are in his new book, New York Unseen.
Although Kordas is not exclusively a street photographer – he’s also a highly accomplished portrait, travel and documentary photographer – his vivid (almost exclusively) black and white street images convey a range of emotions and a clear depiction of where he is. The themes that come across include loneliness and, essentially, how a big city can engulf those living in it and isolate people within a metropolis of millions of humans.
To find out more about his career and motivations, Digital Camera spoke to Luc Kordas via Zoom from his New York City home…
What drove your initial interest in photography?
It came about organically. I was living in London in 2004 and worked with a guy who had an SLR camera. I borrowed it and, curiously, he disappeared into thin air, so I was left with his camera. I started experimenting with taking my first pictures on a film camera. Before, I’d taken pictures on holidays, but never taken it too seriously. I started reading about it, and read my first book about all of the technical stuff.