There’s a relationship between subject and artist in street photography that can’t be found anywhere else. Taking a photo—any kind of photo—is stealing a moment from time. A candid photo, a shot of a person going about their daily business, a person not expecting to be photographed, is stealing not just time but also essence, and then not just stealing essence but taking it and translating it into your own language by way of formal decisions such as framing and distance, but also decisions with more of a psychological/psychic bent—the ineffable stuff of mood, tone, and feeling. But this is a benign sort of theft. Even, sometimes, a kind one.

Street photography is risky. It takes guts. Sometimes the subjects don’t even know they’ve had their picture taken, but sometimes they do and they’re angry about it. Sometimes they’re bewildered; sometimes bemused. But often, and in some of the most successful and intimate street photography, the work feels collaborative between the photographer and the photographed. We see this again and again in these pictures by Sarai Mari. As she traversed the city over the course of one month last year, she encountered the fullness of New York’s diversity but, more than that, she interacted with it all.

Taken as a body of work, a group of photographs shot on the street during a preordained span of time functions explicitly as a memento of that moment. In choosing September of 2020 to make the photographs seen in this exhibition, Sarai Mari entered into a particularly heady milieu. Quarantine was loosening by degrees. Political protests still dotted the city. In between these two energies—the optimistic frisson of being outside again and the righteous anger at unchecked institutional authority—it was an electric month. A time ripe for documentation, and a time that required great sensitivity. Compound all that with the fact that Mari had never practiced street portraiture before creating this work, and we can see these photos for what they are: small celebrations imbued with a tripled newness: the subjects’ experience of being photographed, Mari’s experience making such photos, and people being reborn into the wider world after a time of sequestering from pestilence—often while immersed in a fog of fear and paranoia. And so in Mari’s September 2020 photographs we see the delicate joy of average people—accustomed at that point to the trauma of forced solitude—performing for the camera of a stranger. The extremity of vulnerability and openness made that month an ideal time for such street photography.

I wonder what one might glean from these photos if they were to look back at them many years from now. In their vibrancy and intimacy, they would appear as relics from a happy era rather than the politically and culturally fraught world we now find ourselves in. Maybe, conversely, we can look at them today and imagine a better time to come.

Jesse Pearson is a writer, the founder of Apology magazine, and the host of Apology, a podcast about reading. He has written for Playboy, GQ,

the Los Angeles Times, and more.