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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections > Photography Collection > New York Street Photography Roy Colmer (British, born 1935)Roy Colmer received his artistic training at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and immigrated to New York in 1966. He worked first as a painter before turning to film and photography in the 1970s. In 1982, he studied photography with Lisette Model at the New School, where he later taught a course entitled “Intuitive and Conceptual Approaches to Photography.” He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988 and a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc., in 1990. In addition to what we now think of as “classic” street photography, Colmer also participated early on in conceptual art, often in collaboration with other artists, notably Hanne Darboven. In 1976, Colmer completed a seminal photographic project, Doors, NYC, which includes more than 3,000 images of doors taken in sequence on 120 intersections and streets of Manhattan from Wall Street to Fort Washington. Portions of the work were later exhibited at PS 1 in Queens, and incorporated and shown in Darboven’s work Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983), 1980–83. In a certain sense, the Doors project pushes the snapshot aesthetic as practiced by Winogrand to its most extreme limits. Only a few years later in Los Angeles, Winogrand began the obsessive and repetitive shooting of film, which he never developed, during the final years of his life. “My approaches to photography are either conceptual or intuitive. When working conceptually, I prefer to work with sequence and time. On other occasions I select a location and uncover what is there, working intuitively.” Roy Colmer
10 gelatin silver prints plus title card Purchase of the entire Doors, NYC project made possible through the estate of Leroy A. Moses |
