HEAVY HITTER
“Even if everyone has shot [Empire State], I haven’t shot it my way.”
Such
is the power of 13th Witness—a rising shutterbug from Brooklyn whose pictures are surreal, dreamlike, and would most likely be mistaken for a desktop wallpaper you’d find on a MacBook Pro. “There are definitely surreal parts to my work,” says Tim, who I meet at Union Square, a historic haunt and junction in downtown Manhattan, for an afternoon conversation by the park. Laid-back and understated in true artist fashion, he continues, “But I also have pictures that are very real. It really depends on my mood at the time.” Reworking and post-producing photos of cityscapes and landscapes among other vacillating subjects, 13th Witness splices color and fantasy with canvasses of reality, creating visual orgasm that erupts through one continued glance. “For me, it’s about taking something and taking it a step further,” he says of his thought process, using Photoshop and today’s fastmoving technology to unhinge the extraordinary from the otherwise mundane. “My photos are certainly very dark in terms of color. I’ll have photos of really dramatic cityscapes, clouds, or of a beautiful flower.” Momentarily, a bunch of auburn leaves start to fall around us, proof of an emerging autumn in the City that Never Sleeps. “I’m feeling like I haven’t taken photos in the last two days. I really, really need to get my ass out there and start taking pictures. A guy’s gotta make a living,” Tim says. After all, he says, competition is stiff. And he seems caught within a vicious struggle between himself and other people. He shares, “I’m actually my own photo editor. If I were a printer, I’d probably be a scanner and fax machine too, all rolled into one. I’m very tough on myself. Besides, if you’re shit’s not that important, you won’t get any work.” 13th Witness, at that point, was two hundred six days strong into his “365” project, a self-endeavor for the followers on his website where he posts a different picture of people and his surroundings from day to day. Subsequently, he reworks them and dubs them after songs that best capture the general mood or feeling behind each photo. He most recently published 206 as “Strangers,” an allusion to a trip-hop track off the 1990s Portishead album. He says, “For me, every photo is a song.” In a sea of cultural revolution, hostility, and change, these are freeze frames of reality that keep him grounded, anchored, and unaltered. For 13th Witness, inspiration comes two-fold: movies and music. “I’m very big on the visuals,” says Tim, citing Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick as his cinematic motivations. “But I’m also very much inspired by music, by old hip-hop most especially, when people would sing and speak about the hard times.” Tim left New York when he was 18 to seek out adventures and opportunities abroad. He went to Tokyo and other countries, and in his own words, saw some “bad-ass countries” whose comparisons to the Big Apple were literally a matter of night and day. Subsequently, a lot has changed since his return. “It seems to be getting worse and worse everyday. Music is my way of protecting this idea of New York I have in my head. It’s kind of like a portal. It takes me back to those good ol’ days.” Profound changes are coming in both the photographer’s career (He most recently dipped his hands on short-length videos after doing stopmotion work for Nike) and his beloved hometown, New York—the city that
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