James Maher

Aside from five years in Madison, Wisconsin that I prefer not to discuss, I've spent my whole life in New York. I'm a fine art, street, and portrait photographer, and everything I make starts with this city — its people, its buildings, and its long, layered history.

Photography found me sideways. The bootleg copy of Photoshop I'd downloaded in college to make fake IDs for friends outlived the ID operation, and eventually the savings went toward a first digital camera and a Canon EF 24-70 f/2.8 I still shoot with today. I trained at the International Center of Photography, put in my years assisting commercial photographers, and opened my own studio in 2006.

Before I knew it was called street photography, it was just walking and watching people. Two decades later that habit has become a fine art print archive, an ongoing study of New York's neighborhoods and architecture, portrait commissions across the city, and a license to lead NYC photography tours and workshops. The pieces here are drawn from that archive: the city's geometry, its light, and the people moving through it.

You can find my complete archive — New York City prints, cityscapes, black and white galleries, and street photography — along with my guides and essays at m...

International Center of Photography, New York. I also teach street photography through workshops and private photo tours across New York City, and wrote The Essentials of Street Photography, along with an extensive series of free guides on street, cityscape, and night photography at James Maher Photography.

My documentary projects and essays on New York — photography, creativity, and urbanism — appear in Glass City, my newsletter on photography and the city, read by 13,000 subscribers. I also maintain a live map of current photography exhibitions across New York's galleries and museums. Portrait and event commissions across NYC, and twenty years of work in the city's neighborhoods.