Asphalt Spirits NYC
Journey into Awakening and Remembrance
Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2026
Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2026, A Journey into Awakening and Remembrance is Jahmani’s ongoing poetic photographic work and developing photographic, film and soundscape installation and photo book. This portrait and street reportage work explores the interior lives and impermanent world of everyday New Yorkers, navigating the city’s unpredictable and chaotic streets. The images serve as both inquiry and celebration, honoring the diverse cultural beauty, mystery, wonder, vulnerability, joy, shadow, love and the paradoxical nature of life in New York. Created within the context of a nation challenged and actively struggling to sustain it’s moral center, uphold it’s democratic ideals, and find a new path forward; the project reflects on memory, resilience, belonging and transformation. Asphalt Spirits NYC probes the awareness and emotional ties between New Yorkers across generations, where race, class, gender, identity, wealth, power, and culture intersect and collide. Revealing something essential that’s beneath the surface of everyday life, that’s elusive, fragile, and profound.
Jahmani’s photographs reflect the perspective of a curious and mindful filmmaker, photographer, and storyteller. His work is both a photographic investigation and spiritual journey. In his images, he offers a different, an inner world of New York, where the noise and chaos fade out and the transcending encounters become clear. As Jahmani reflects, I grew up between East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and the East Village, an experience that continues to shape this work as both a personal journey and a meditation on the consciousness, energy, and evolution of New York City and its people. This work explores the layered dimensions of who we are, within and beyond the illusions and conditioned stories we inherit and move through, where culture, lived experience, and shifting constellations of perception, emotion, and intention are continuously unfolding. Within this interconnected field, our lives are not separate, but in constant relation, shaping and being shaped by one another.
Amid a world shaped by division, conflict, and instability, this work returns to a central question: how might we live more consciously, compassionately, and truthfully, and remember who we really are?
How might we come to recognize our interconnection with ourselves, one another, and the environment; and create space to meet each other where we are, as we are, with receptivity, responsiveness, wisdom, and care?
Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976–1986, shot on Kodachrome color and Tri-X black + white 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 NYC Part II: 1999-2026, shot on color and black + white film, and digital, 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; unfolding within a city where countless cultures, voices, and histories meet, overlap, and continuously redefine one another.
In this unpredictable and challenging moment across America and globally, Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976–1986 and Part II: 1999–2026 offers a visual and experiential space for reflection on the different worlds we have inhabited, and those we occupy now. The work is a window into our shifting layers of reality that shape perception, while holding the enduring contradiction of what it means to be human and our sacred connection to nature, ourselves, one another, and all living beings.
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: 1999-2026 would make an important addition to the field.
For more information about Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2026 projects, don't hesitate to get in touch with Jahmani Perry, email: jahmaniperry@yahoo.com