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 — A Journey into Awakening and Remembrance is an ongoing poetic photographic work by *award-winning filmmaker Jahmani Perry. The work and project explores the complex connection between the heart, soul, and life experiences of New Yorkers and this unique and amazing city across decades. The images meditate on unexpected fleeting moments and interconnections—the diverse beauty, mystery, aliveness, joy, and irony of everyday life—celebrating the wonder and paradox of human nature, at the heart of a city and it’s people in perpetual transformation, where race, class, gender, identity, wealth, power, and culture converge and collide.
Perry’s photographs reflect the perspective of a curious and mindful filmmaker and storyteller. His work is both a photographic inquiry and a spiritual journey. In his images, he presents a different, an inner world of New York, where the noise and chaos fade out and the transcending encounters become clear. As Perry reflects: This has been and continues to be an incredible journey and exploration—an unfolding meditation on the vibrancy, resilience, and presence of this remarkable city and its people. Walking its streets remains a practice in stillness, trust, and being present in the different energies of the moment. To be open, to see and be aware of a larger perspective, and context, revealing the richness and sacredness of life, its challenges, and discovering and remembering the many dimensions and unseen truths of the essence of who are we individually and collectively, our history, family and cultural interconnections.
Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976–1986, shot on Kodachrome and Tri-X film, captures people’s everyday lives amidst a bygone New York—on the edge of collapse, gripped by violence, homelessness, drug addiction, and the AIDS crisis, and deep racial tensions and class divides. Amid this turmoil, the raw energy of hip-hop, punk, and street art emerged alongside rising gentrification, greed, and cultural transformation. In contrast, Asphalt Spirits Part II: 1999-2025 reflects a transformed New York, where beauty, wealth, poverty and complexity now collide in sharper, more urgent contrast. Together, they are an ode to two distinct eras of New York, each alive with movement, resilience, and self-reflection.
In this uncertain and tumultuous moment—here in America and across the world—Asphalt Spirits NYC, Part I: 1976–1986 and Part II: 1999–2025, offers a visual and emotional space to reflect on our shared humanity. The work illuminates the layers of our individual and collective experience, revealing what binds us across time and what we are passing on to future generations.
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 still 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: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2025 would make an important addition to the field.
Asphalt Spirits NYC, the first solo exhibition of this ongoing series, was shown at Just Above Midtown /Downtown Gallery, New York, NY, Curator: Linda Goode Bryant (1983). This show was recently mentioned in curator, Thomas Lax’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 2022) Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces show catalog, under Jahmani’s a.k.a John Perry III, Recent Photographs. This MoMA exhibition celebrated the landmark influence of Just Above Midtown Gallery (JAM) on New York City’s art scene in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond.
*Sony Innovators Award, a.k.a. John Perry III.
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