New York-based street photographer Billy Dinh has amassed a large and loyal Instagram following thanks to his talents. His dramatic, moody images heavily rely on light and shadow, which coupled with his ability to capture unique moments, make them look pulled from a film. Through Dinh’s lens, we’re able to watch the world unfold and peek into the small moments of life.

Whether it’s a woman wiping tears from her eyes as her train is about to pull away, or a man staring out the window on an empty ferry, Dinh takes average moments and elevates them to high art. With formal training as an illustrator, Dinh clearly has developed an eye for putting together captivating stories that pull the viewer in.

We were lucky enough to chat with Dinh about his street photography and learn more about how his passion for photography developed. We also learn more about what he looks for when he’s out on the street, as well as his biggest concern with AI imaging. Read on for My Modern Met’s exclusive interview.

How did your love of photography begin?

Photography has always been in my life since as early as I can remember. From the days of my family’s analog camera to picking up disposable cameras for class field trips, to owning my own point-and-shoot digital cameras, to where we are now with mobile phone cameras, photography has always been a way for me to preserve my memories and experiences.

It wasn’t until I started traveling abroad within the last 10 years that photography started to become something more than that. At first, the photos were more personal and were captured on my mobile phone. However, as I visited more places, I slowly found myself wanting to take photos more creatively and outgrew the mobile phone. I’ve been obsessed with photography ever since I decided to take it seriously.

What specifically attracted you to street photography as a genre?

I started my early photography career capturing landscapes and cityscapes. But something always felt unfulfilling to me about that experience, and coming from an illustration background, I had always been interested in illustrating people. It wasn’t until my visits to countries like Guatemala, Jordan, Egypt, and Mexico that I started to naturally gravitate toward taking photos of people instead of places.

Initially, it was because of the appreciation of diversity. How different, interesting, and beautiful people looked in their own way from all around the world. But soon, I became more interested in how people lived and not just what they looked like. How they interacted with each other and their surroundings. I become more interested in their stories and their lives and the little everyday moments that make them who they are, no matter where they are or where they’re from.

How does your photography change the way you live and move through the city?

It’s for sure changed so much in the way I live. I find that I can’t go anywhere these days without having a camera around my neck or in my hands. It’s changed the way I see the world and has constantly allowed me to see my own home in NYC with fresh eyes. I find I would explore parts of places I never cared about before or even knew existed. I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for constantly observing and being present wherever I am. In some ways, it has slowed me down a bit and has allowed me to take my time in a city that’s so constantly fast-paced. I now take so much notice of details in things that would have never in a million years interest me before. I can say photography has given me a whole new appreciation of life.

When you are out shooting, what are you looking for when you decide what warrants a click of the shutter?

It’s a combination of things. I think if I can sum it up into four categories, it would be the following. First, the visual element. I look for interesting people, colors, textures, layers, lighting, shapes, and interesting ways people and/or objects are positioned in a scene. Things that are appealing to the eye.

The second category I look for is what’s happening with the subjects. I look for interesting and unique interactions between people and objects in their surroundings. I enjoy having a story element and hidden messages in my photos. I enjoy photographs that make you think and wonder.

The third is the overall feeling of what I see. Sometimes you can see a scene unfold before your eyes and have it strike a chord emotionally or make you feel nostalgic. There’s something personal when a photo can remind you of something from the past, whether it feels good or bad.

The last category I enjoy capturing is something that looks and feels from another place, time, or world. I love movies in the way they often take real-life scenes and make them feel like they’re not. I particularly gravitate to this when I am out shooting. While what I end up capturing will include one or more of these categories, it’s coming across all four at once that warrants a satisfying click of the shutter to me.

You’ve had a lot of success on social media. What have been the positives and negatives of that success?

I think the positive side of my social media presence is being able to have my photographs reach people it wouldn’t normally be able to. It’s also allowed me to meet some amazing people and provided me with some great opportunities. It’s a privilege to be able to have my work seen by people that could potentially inspire them to pick up a camera. It’s one of the greatest feelings.

On the other hand, though, there’s a lot of pressure with social media. Especially if you are a full-time artist and rely on social media as a way to promote your work and brand. It’s all tied to the numbers, and that, in turn, can affect the honesty in what you create. While I’ve been much better with this, it’s definitely a problem I see today.

AI is such a hot topic now. As a photographer, do you have concerns about AI—particularly if it continues to improve and blur the lines with photography?

It’s an interesting question. I’ve been pretty active following the growth of AI art since it became more mainstream recently, and as of right now, I have mixed feelings about it. A part of me sees the benefits in how it can help take existing digital art mediums to the next level and even excel as an art form on its own. I’ve seen some phenomenal “post-photograph” AI work that, while looking as realistic as photographs, depict things that just couldn’t happen in real life but look extremely real. I think this is where AI is excelling in my opinion.

The main concern I have with AI is not so much that it will blur the line with photography. I think it is inevitable that AI will look so real that you can’t tell, and it will happen very soon. However, a photograph documenting the world will always be a snapshot of something that exactly exists timestamped in history. AI can never achieve that.

My biggest concern with the whole thing is trying to pass off AI as actual photographs without mentioning it. This is where my concern is. At the moment, the average person probably couldn’t tell the difference between most AI work being passed as photos. I’ve been getting asked more and more frequently over the last few months if my photos are AI. They are not. If something doesn’t change, we may not be able to know what a real photograph is versus what’s AI in the near future, and that’s when we lose what actually existed and what is made up.

What’s next for you?

I have a few personal photography projects I am working on that I hope to share with the world one day, and a few I am in the process of starting soon. I’m not ready to share them at the moment, unfortunately, but anyone who’s been following along with my journey may have some ideas as to what they may be. I am also in the early stages of putting together ideas for my first book. I want to actually release something I’d be proud of, so I’m taking my time with it. I am also excited to just continue to grow as a photographer and share with everyone the world through my eyes.

Billy Dinh: Website | Instagram | Twitter

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Billy Dinh.

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Peter, fully dressed, looks down at a boy in white trunks swimming a length of the pool below. Turquoise hills stretch away into sunlight behind them. David Hockney’s stunning diagram of LA heat and cool blue water, frozen in stylised ripples, appears perfectly lucid in its equipoise of figure, hue and geometry, yet also tense and mysterious. What is the relationship between the two men: the swimmer submerged and unaware, the sentinel watching unseen from above?

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was painted in 1972. This monumental masterpiece has changed hands several times since, but never so conspicuously as in the winter of 2018, when it sold at Christie’s for $90m (£71m), breaking records for the most expensive work by a living artist.

The buyer was Pierre Chen, a Taiwanese multibillionaire in his late 60s, whose electronics company, Yageo, is a global leader in the passive components required for mobiles, laptops, desktops and cars. Chen founded the company in 1977, before he was even 21. In 1999 he also established the not-for-profit Yageo Foundation, which holds, or administers (or is it owns?), his massive art collection, a substantial tranche of which is now on display in Capturing the Moment at Tate Modern.

The first thing to say about this questionable enterprise is that Chen/Yageo owns some tremendous works of modern and contemporary art. He has the zeal and wealth of the titanic collector; and the advice, for more than 20 years, of a former Christie’s executive.

He owns an upside-down Georg Baselitz, several Picasso portraits and one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes. He owns a quartet of Andy Warhol self-portraits in fading primary colours, and an eerie Warhol Double Marlon [Brando], silkscreened in sinister black on taupe.

He collects the enormous photographs of the German artist Thomas Struth: crowds overwhelmed by Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in the Louvre, or simply flitting past like ephemeral ghosts before the deathless magnificence of Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in Venice. These are all on show at Tate Modern, along with paintings by Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, John Currin and Peter Doig.

The last, not incidentally, is one of Doig’s earliest and most valuable canoe paintings: in arsenical greens, the blond on board drifting an unsuspecting hand through ominous waters, based directly on a still from the horror film Friday the 13th.

So the promised connection between photography and painting is there in one fundamental sense. Namely that Chen buys both. It is also true that some of what he collects is painting based on photography (Warhol, Dumas, Doig), or photography that looks at painting (Struth, self-evidently). And in addition, he has some extraordinary works that unseat the imagery of both camera and brush by Richter.

Two landscapes by the German painter question the supposed truth of the original photographs to such an extent that one wonders whether these scenes – a Bavarian hillside, the motionless Venetian lagoon – contain hidden secrets. Richter’s transcriptions are neither sharp of focus nor rendering, his sporadic sfumato blurs implying that the world beyond the painted surface really is entirely lost to us.

A third painting shows the face of a long-dead woman: Richter’s Aunt Marianne, forever young and blond as she props baby Gerhard on a pillow in the 1930s. The silver-grey paint unites the two figures in hazy horizontal brushstrokes; something like distortion, or a memory one cannot bring into focus, or a presence that cannot be summoned from a photograph. Marianne was later sterilised and then murdered by the Nazis.

It is possible that visitors might make a connection back to another historic image four galleries earlier: Dorothea Lange’s immortal photograph of a destitute mother in a US pea-croppers’ camp in 1936, but I doubt it. This show is far too rambling and chaotic. To bolster Chen’s collection, Tate Modern includes ill-assorted works from its own, including strident new acquisitions by Christina Quarles and Laura Owens, and venerable portraits by Lucian Freud – including a deeply moving image of his mother painted by her deathbed – and Alice Neel, at least part of whose electrifying gifts as a painter come from living proximity to her New York subjects.

So the premise feels like nonsense. But worse still is the alignment of images. Did Lange take that heroic photograph – which resulted in emergency government aid – just to be hung in the same room as Bacon and Picasso as part of some vague talk about emotion and expression in 20th-century art? What has Neel got to do with Freud? Why are Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of seas, touching on light, dark and the nature of infinity, related to abstract paintings?

The wall texts are almost comically simplistic. “While photographers grapple with the mechanics of the camera, painters work with the surface of the canvas and the texture of paint.” There is no thesis, no catalogue, no developed argument, barely a single striking idea on the subject of either painting or photography, let alone their relationship, even though this is art history 101.

It would have cost nothing to have shown the Hockney in a room of its own with the photos from which it derives (first serendipitously, and then by fascinating design) to open minds and eyes to the kind of visual knowledge the artist himself so much prizes. But all or any of this was too much trouble, unaccountably, for an exhibition running all the way through to the end of next January.

Why are the walls of one of our foremost public art museums being given to a private collector in this way? You may argue that this is a rare chance to see such great works here – though some are remarkably familiar from other loan shows – before they end up in someone else’s collection. For Pierre Chen follows the blue-chip market, after all.

Capturing the Moment is not a serious exhibition. To draw connections of any sort between the works feels ultimately specious. Some stuff we borrowed (I hope for free, given the burnishing effect of display in Tate Modern, though tickets are £20 a head) and some stuff we already owned. A more complacent exhibition cannot be imagined.

• Capturing the Moment: A Journey Through Painting and Photography is at Tate Modern, London, until 28 January 2024

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — Judith Joy Ross’ photography exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will transport you to decades past.

Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says this body of Ross’ work “gives us a portrait of who we are in our time and place.”

Over 200 prints are on display; many of them made in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Joshua Chuang, Organizing Curator, says Ross first discovered photography at Moore College of Art.

“Straightforward photography captured my heart,” says photographer Ross.

Ross says she went out and photographed people and that when she took strangers’ photographs, she was intensely relating to them.

Ross works in series and the exhibition starts with Eurana Park, which Chuang says “is the park that she and her siblings went to when they were children.”

Ross calls the park kind of a Brigadoon.

Her portraits capture the human experience.

“We encounter all of these individuals who are just facing everyday life,” says Barberie. “Every photograph is a very brief exchange between two strangers who are sort of united by the big camera between them.”

Ross used an old-fashioned 8×10-inch view camera on a tripod to take photos.

Ross describes her photographs as “direct and honest and evocative.”

One of her longest running series is called Jobs. There are photographs of people at work in their uniforms, along with members of the military.

Chuang says Ross’ pictures have amazing emotional depth that match “the complexity of her subjects.”

Ross also photographed inside Hazleton public schools where she grew up.

“I wanted to help support people caring about children,” she says.

She’s also photographed visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C. and members of Congress.

As you walk through the exhibition, you can see the progression of Ross’ work over the years.

“It’s quite epic in its arc, when you think about American history over the past 50 years,” Chuang says.

“I’m focused on looking until the world makes more sense and I see something,” says Ross. “When you get the frame right, you found meaning.”

“I hope people can connect with these people,” she says of her work.

Judith Joy Ross’ retrospective exhibition is on view through August 6.

Judith Joy Ross Photography exhibition/

Philadelphia Museum of Art

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

A British photographer from Somerset, UK, who worked and lived in Ootacamund (now Udagamandalam; better known as Ooty) and Coonoor in British India, Albert Thomas Watson Penn operated largely outside of formal systems of photography such as societies and institutions, and its conventions and styles. He spent most of his life in the Nilgiris in southern India, where he worked as a commercial photographer, occasionally also contributing to ethnographic studies of the area.

Penn left his family home in Street, UK, shortly before turning twelve and, after a brief period in London, arrived in Madras (now Chennai) by 1864. He worked at the photography studio *Nicholas Brothers & Co., before moving to Ooty in 1865 to set up and operate a branch there. He married Elizabeth Eagan in 1870 and continued working there until he acquired the studio five years later, subsequently running it under his name. In 1877, a year after the onset of the Great Famine of South India, his business in Ooty slowed and he took his practice to Bangalore, where he photographed the cantonment and the relief work being carried out.

The following year, he travelled to the UK to learn more about photographic techniques and technology. When he returned the next year, he shut down the branch he had started in Bangalore in order to focus on his studio in Ooty, where business had again picked up, and which in 1880 he renamed as the Ootacamund Photo Establishment. In the decade that followed, he undertook two major photographic tours of South India. In 1902, Penn opened Reliance Auction and Commission Agency, through which he made regular sales for at least ten years after, while also running the Farrington Hotel for an indeterminate period. He left Ooty with his family in 1911 for Eversholt, England, but returned to India in 1922 to Coonoor, where he spent his last two years before succumbing to a stroke.

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Unlike many British photographers in India at the time, Penn did not affiliate himself with photographic societies or institutions such as the *Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). As a commercial photographer, his earnings came from portraits and group photographs of the British population in Ooty, Coonoor and other neighbouring hill stations. He took several of his photographs at social events such as dance balls, weddings and hunting trips and at recreational clubs where Penn was a member. He also produced landscape views of the hills around Ooty that were reminiscent in composition and style of European mountainscapes popular in Britain, in contrast to the architectural and topographic views typical of colonial photographers of the time. His panoramic photographs — which were made by joining multiple images — as well as the smaller pictures he made for printing on postcards enjoyed much popularity.

As a large proportion of the town’s population comprised visiting tourists and seasonal residents he had a constant clientele, enabling him to earn a steady annual income. His constant presence in British social circles and active participation in their recreational activities — such as hunts (he was an amateur rifle shot), athletic events, choral performances and concerts — contributed a great deal to the sustained patronage his studio received. His photographs of these events were often published in local or regional papers such as The South of India Observer or The Madras Mail.

Penn also accepted commissions for ethnographic studies of the native population of the region, which featured in such notable volumes as Ootacamund, a History (1908) by Frederick Price and Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909) by Edgar Thurston. His images were notably different from others produced at the time: he photographed his subjects — mainly members of the indigenous Kurumba and Toda communities — as if in the course of their daily activities, such as farming, foraging, cattle-herding and even professional grooming, rather than in the static and heavily staged style that was the norm then. His photographs of Dancing Girls slumped from exhaustion or casual images of himself with his friends are just some examples of his commitment to journalistic documentation, which can be seen as early as 1876 in his work on the Great Famine of South India.

As he lived and worked far from the urban centres of colonial rule and rarely engaged with surveyors or institutions, Penn’s life has not come under much historical scrutiny. His biographical details in The Nicholas Brothers & A.T.W Penn: Photographers of South India 1855-1885, by his great-grandson Christopher Penn, were pieced together from press clippings, publications bearing his photographs and correspondences. Although Penn was a photographer of renown only in the local social and administrative circles, his photographs have since gained a wider audience. Now found in collections across Europe –– from Paris to Vienna and Berlin the largest number of his photographs are presently found in institutions in the UK, such as the *British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society and the National Army Museum.

This excerpt is taken from MAP Academy’s ‘Encyclopedia of Art’ with permission.

The MAP Academy is a non-profit, online platform — consisting of an Encyclopedia, Courses and a Blog — which encourages knowledge building and engagement with the visual arts of the region.

When Nicholas Blair first showed me his photographs for the book Castro to Christopher: Gay Streets of America 1979-1986, I had many thoughts. But, I admit, the one that pushed to the forefront right away was: “Why am I not in any of them?”

I was only half joking.

Back at that benighted time in LGBTQ+ history – way before anyone added the “T”, the “Q” or the “+” – the streets that Blair’s title refers to, San Francisco’s Castro District and New York’s Christopher Street, were occupied by what would now seem like a shockingly circumscribed group of people. On any given weekend on Christopher Street, Manhattan, where I could reliably be found, nearly every person you saw you either knew, recognised, or had already had sex with. While Gay Pride marches would bring tens of thousands of us to the streets every year, on all other days our footprint was relatively small, insular and every bit as site-specific as the title of Blair’s book suggests.

In the era of these photos, nearly everything that was commonly considered “gay” either happened on these streets or was connected to them. Buttressed by the bars, those streets were the only places where you could reliably meet significant numbers of people like you, announce yourself to them by your gaze and your gait, tease and befriend them, spawn a community with them and, naturally, meet them for sex. The more adventurous among us even had sex with them right then and there.

The result was that those streets of San Francisco and New York had a special frisson and freedom. They were as teeming with eros and interaction then as today they are isolating and alienating, thanks to our smartphone myopia. Luckily, that special world can be seen in all its heat, humour and intimacy in Blair’s photos. One image in his book has elements of all three: in the foreground two figures are kissing. Behind them stand three men, each looking in a different direction yet all driven by the same goal – to see and be seen. Each is presenting and searching, preening and praying. Their expressions may be soldier straight and hunter cold, but below lies fire.

The humour and edge of those streets is seen in high relief in an image of two leather daddies in full chaps drawing money from an ATM. It presents a perfect contrast between mundane and profane. And, make no mistake, a joyous embrace of the profane had a profound role in many of our lives in those years, way before such unimaginable things would occur as same-sex marriage, parenthood or even personhood. Back then, the gay world still had the thrill of outlaw culture, though, sadly, that came with the consequence of making us targets for everything from cruel taunts to life-threatening bashings. While Blair’s photos focus on celebrating the culture, anyone who was on the scene at the time could see beyond the frame, where danger always lay in wait. While it was common to hear the term “faggot” hurled in your direction back then, I never heard or read the term “homophobia”. There’s a simple reason for that. Most people back then didn’t think there was anything the least bit wrong in treating gay people with revulsion.

Despite that, those times brimmed with possibility and excitement. The era of these photos gains even more poignancy since it straddles the time just before Aids and the years when the disease threatened to wipe out gay people entirely. For that reason, and others, it’s impossible not to look at these photos without a profound sense of loss. But that’s hardly all I feel when I look at them. I also feel warmth and wit. I feel invention and defiance and, to quote Saint Donna (Summer), “I feel love”.

In the end, I do see myself in these photos, reflected in my connection to a sensibility and an experience that, however far removed from the current world, remains embedded in something eternal: history.

• Castro to Christopher: Gay Streets of America 1979-1986 by Nicholas Blair, with an introduction by veteran music critic Jim Farber, is published by powerHouse books