Gus Powell: The Company of Strangers

by Jason Fulford (Artist), Gus Powell (Artist), Leanne Shapton (Editor)

Inspired by Frank O’Hara’s 1964 book Lunch Poems, photographer Gus Powell, who worked for four years as picture editor at the New Yorker, would spend his own lunch hours wandering midtown Manhattan making poetry. The resulting book of street photography, featuring photographs from his series Lunch Pictures, feels both romantic/nostalgic, and strikingly contemporary. Powell’s attention to the choreography of pedestrians is remarkable, as is his rendering of midtown light, refracted by office buildings and glass.

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Jason Fulford (born in Atlanta, 1973) is a photographer and cofounder of the non-profit publisher J&L Books. Fulford’s photographs have been featured in Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, Blind Spot, and Aperture magazine. He has published many books of his work, including Raising Frogs for $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010), Hotel Oracle (2013), and Picture Summer on Kodak Film (2020), as well as coedited The Photographer’s Playbook (with Gregory Halpern, Aperture, 2014). He is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.