Behind the Lens & Between the Feedings: Dispatch №4

The City looks different from a stroller

In New York City, walking is everything. It's how you think, how you decompress, how you people watch. It's the closest thing this city has to meditation. So when I imagined my postpartum days, I always knew they would involve a lot of it — just me, the baby, and the Upper East Side.

As I wrote in Dispatch №3, slowing down has become the unlikely theme of this chapter. But what I didn't see coming was what that slower pace would start to reveal.

The city runs on schedules I never knew existed

Before the baby, my New York had a pretty narrow rhythm. Rush hour. After work dinners. Weekend brunch or photographing an engagement session in Central Park, a wedding in Brooklyn, a family shoot on a quiet Sunday morning. That was my city.

Now I'm seeing the whole rest of it. Whole Foods at 10:30am on a Monday is a sea of strollers. Three o'clock is the wrong time to mobile order at Starbucks as school just got out and the line is a frappuccino flavored chaos. Late afternoons in Central Park belong to a completely different cast of characters than the weekend crowds I knew: park conservationists tending to flower beds, baby music classes on the lawn, longtime Upper East Siders settled on a bench with a book like they have nowhere else to be and no interest in being there. That light at 4pm in the park in spring is something I have walked past a hundred times and never actually seen.

What this is doing to my photographer brain

My hands are full. I'm mostly not shooting on these walks. The stroller doesn't leave much room for a camera bag and the moments move faster than I can reach for my phone. But something else is happening that feels more important than any single frame I could capture.

I'm noticing again.

There's a particular kind of autopilot that sets in when you're moving through a city on a deadline, on a routine, on a schedule that looks the same every week. I didn't realize how much I'd been running on that autopilot until it switched off. Now, moving at stroller pace through a neighborhood I thought I knew, I'm catching the details that used to blur past me — the light, the rhythms, the quiet human moments happening at 11:02 am on a Thursday that the rest of the working world simply isn't around to see.

I can feel something shifting. A new appreciation for the unhurried look, the accidental frame, the moment you only catch because you weren't rushing toward the next one. I don't know exactly what kind of photographer this chapter is making me into yet. But I have a feeling she's going to be a more observant one.

More soon. 📸🤍