Chrissy Piper: Where the Day Takes You

”There are eight million stories in the naked city,” says the narrator in Jules Dassin’s 1948 noir classic Naked City. This sense of the bustling American metropolis as a vast reservoir of untapped stories has moved numerous photographers to surf the urban sprawl with an open-ended attention to chance encounters and unexpected visual serendipities. After watching the documentary film A Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank in the early 1990s, Los Angeles–based photographer Chrissy Piper wrote a fan letter to Frank, and traveled to New York to meet him. Frank’s work and their eventual friendship inspired Piper to continue shooting on the street. The pictures gathered in this book were taken mostly on the streets of New York City, but also in other locales across America, during various road trips with friends.