Asphalt Spirits NYC
Journey into Awakening and Remembrance
Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2025
“Finding yourself is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.”
-Emily McDowell, writer and illustrator
Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2025 is an ongoing photographic work and work-in-progress photographic, film, and soundscape installation and photo book, exploring the inner landscape of awareness, belonging, and identity within the diverse everyday lives of New Yorkers on the unpredictable, intense, and chaotic streets of the city. Within the experience of the photograph, by Jahmani Perry, Award-Winning Filmmaker, Sony Innovators Award, a.k.a. John Perry III. Perry’s intimate portraits and often ironic New York City street scenes reveal a meditation and celebration of the diverse beauty, mystery, shadow, stillness, humor, and paradoxical nature amidst our individual and interconnected existence. The photographs are a poetic inquiry into the timeless and formless essence of remembering who you truly are as human beings, within and beyond our arbitrary borders, conditioned thoughts, fears, biases, hatred, and judgments at the complex and contradicting intersection of race, class, gender, roles, and cultural and social systemic constructs.
Perry has lived and worked in New York City for most of his life. From 1976 to 1986 and 1999 to 2025 (from 1987 through 1998, Perry was in LA making and working on films), he has been on an incredible photographic and evolutionary journey, witnessing and uncovering the vibrancy, fragility, and presence of the people of this city. His thoughts, ‘walking and turning each corner, have become a daily awakening in learning to be still, open, and trusting of the inherent truth of the immediate moment and the vast seen and unseen impermanent richness within the mystery of life in one of the world’s most ethnically and culturally diverse cities in the world.’
The work in Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986, shot on Kodachrome color and Tri-X black-and-white film, is a portrait from a bygone era of a city on the brink of bankruptcy, teeming with drugs and violence, beset by the AIDS crisis and haunted by brutal racial injustice and longstanding class divisions. At the time, New York City was where the emanation of hip-hop, punk, and street art intermingled with the rise of extravagance, greed, and gentrification.
Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 and Part II: 1999-2025 is an ode to these different periods, to the relentless movement of the city’s nine million people, to their resilience, creativity, and wild spirit. Each image transcends time and place and questions, mirrors, and illuminates the multifaceted realities and textured New York stories of who we are and the world in which we live. However, a different New York appeared in the initial Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 and the intensified contrast between the city and the world today in Asphalt Spirits NYC Part II: 1999-2025.
How can we see through the contradicting illusions and veils of fear, division, and dehumanization and remember the essence and value of our true nature?
What does being an aware, open-hearted, and free human mean?
How do we reclaim large areas of peace and love within ourselves? How do we unlearn bias and prejudice? How do we do that?
How might we heal, transform, and thrive in a city, country, and world Dr. King envisioned when he spoke about creating “Beloved Communities” where compassion, understanding, and loving-kindness are present? Where Black and Brown lives matter, our environment matters, and an equitable, democratic, and sustainable society for all beings to flourish matters.
At this uncertain, turbulent, and critical moment in our current history and times in America and abroad, the ongoing Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 + Asphalt Spirits NYC Part II: 1999-2025 photographic work are an invitation to inhabit a deeper awareness of the many dimensions of our tender heart and reflect on an expanded mindset and possibility of our shared grace and human connection—shedding light on a past, present, and future, expressing and reimagining the timeless essence of who we are and what we share.
Julian Cox, Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Art Gallery of Ontario and former photography curator at various museums in America and Europe, said of Perry’s work, “His photographs are intimate, thoughtful fragments, lovingly wrested from the buzz and hum of daily life in New York. A stilled quiet pervades these pictures, achieved through a subtly anonymous stance developed and known. The photographs are poignant and demonstrate his desire to show the intricate links of the visual drama surrounding and connecting us all. Perry is a storyteller whose photographs have the broad, resonant structure of elemental tales. As an installation and published monograph photo book, Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I:1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2025 would make an important addition to the field.”
For more information about Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2025 projects, don't hesitate to get in touch with Jahmani Perry, email: jahmaniperry@yahoo.com