Sleeping Drivers, 2002-2005

When I began creating 'Sleeping Drivers' (2002-2005), I had already lived in NYC for ten years but was just transitioning to life as a new parent. Pushing my son’s stroller day after day around the suburbanized neighborhood of the West Village, I started wondering where the energy and theater of the street, popularized by Weegee, Winogrand, and Levitt, had disappeared to. During my wanderings, I became intrigued by the confluence of black town cars and their eerie symbolism, waiting as heralds of death, and I began to photograph the drivers — making visible the lives of those so often seen only in the margins. As my focus honed in on these individuals, I started to pay attention to the news reports, discovering the sobering reality that being a livery driver is a dangerous profession. In 1992, there was a record of 39 drivers murdered. This statistic gradually declined over the next few years; however, as I was working on this project the news media was again reporting on a string of livery drivers found dead in their vehicles. In retrospect I was a sleep-deprived father, looking for space to make my work and place for the self.