Asphalt Spirits NYC
Journey into Awakening and Remembrance
Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2026
Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you.
-James Baldwin, author and activist
Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976–1986 + Part II: 1999–2026, A Journey into Awakening and Remembrance, is Jahmani Perry's multi-decade photographic work and developing immersive photographic, film, music, and soundscape installation, and photo book. Through portraits and everyday encounters, the project explores the interior lives of New Yorkers navigating the city's ever-changing landscape. The images serve as both inquiry into the past and a celebration of the present, honoring the beauty, mystery, vulnerability, and paradoxical nature of life within New York’s diverse cultural fabric. 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 work reflects on memory, identity, and belonging, revealing how individual lives are shaped by and connected to one another in ways both visible and unseen.
Jahmani’s photographs reflect the perspective of a curious and mindful filmmaker, photographer, and storyteller. His work is both a photographic investigation and a spiritual journey. In his images, he reveals an inner New York, where the noise and velocity of the city give way to moments of presence, reflection, and human connection. Walking the streets of New York became not only a photographic practice, but a lifelong practice of presence, attention, and witnessing. 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 an ongoing meditation on the consciousness, energy, and evolution of New York City and its people. Through fleeting encounters and moments of quiet presence, the work reveals something fragile, elusive, and deeply human beneath the city's surface, inviting us to slow down and reconsider what it means to truly see and experience one another.
Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976–1986, photographed on Kodachrome color and Tri-X black-and-white film, captures everyday life in a city confronting violence, economic decline, homelessness, addiction, the AIDS crisis, and profound racial and class divisions. Amid these challenges, hip-hop, punk, and street art emerged as transformative cultural forces, reshaping the city's creative identity.
In contrast, Asphalt Spirits NYC Part II: 1999–2026, photographed on film and digital media, reflects a transformed New York, where beauty, wealth, poverty, and complexity coexist in increasingly visible tension. Together, the two bodies of work form an intergenerational portrait of New York across fifty years—a living archive of memory, change, resilience, and human experience within one of the world's most dynamic and culturally diverse cities.
I have know Jahmani Perry for over for over two decades and have been consistently impressed by his photographic and film work. He has been highly productive throughout those years, creating large bodies of thematically-framed work which combines stirring urban reportage with spectacular eruptions of magic realism. The poetics and polemics which merge in his film and video projects are equally imbued with a social justice driven fusion of sophisticated esthetics and humanist ethics. -Greg Tate, music and culture critic, journalist, author, editor, musician, composer, and co-curator of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston show, Writing the. Future: Basquiat and the Hip Hop Generation (October 2020-July 2021), and *May 2024 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Special Citation and Awards, posthumously awarded to Greg Tate
His photographs are intimate, thoughtful fragments, lovingly wrested from the whirr and hum of daily life in New York. A stilled quiet pervades these pictures, achieved through subtly anonymous stance that is developed and knowing. The photographs are poignant and demonstrate his desire to show the intricate links of the visual drama that surrounds and connects us all. Jahmani is a storyteller whose photographs have the broad, resonant structure of elemental tales. As an installation and published monograph volume, Asphalt Spirits NYC would make for an important addition to the field. -Julian Cox, Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Art Gallery of Ontario and former photography curator at various museums in America and Europe.
For exhibition, partnerships, publication, acquisition, and project inquiries:
Jahmani Perry
jahmaniperry@yahoo.com