In pictures: The danger, thrill and chaos of growing up in New York

“Photography gave me a real reason to straighten out my life and grow as a person. I think people know my work for documenting celebrities and models and, don’t get me wrong, I love doing that. But that’s not where I come from,“ Zangas tells Dazed in a conversation over email. “I started taking pictures just being a kid running around the city. I wanted to make a book that reflected that and shed light on those less recognised, to take beautiful pictures that make them feel noticed.”

The principle story emerging from Zangas’ pictures is a coming-of-age tale many of us will feel an affinity with. He conveys that heady sensation of the newfound freedom of adolescence and all the precarity and risk it entails. From fireballs in the streets to the bridges of the Hudson River at dusk and friends fucking about with flames, skateboards, cigarettes and aerosols, Zangas’ portraits evoke the febrile quality of NYC nights and the sense of feeling reckless and part of a crew. One topless figure brandishes a knife, a masked kid gazes out defiantly through the eye holes of a balaclava, a young couple kiss against the backdrop of a gathering crowd, a pair of cyclists wheelie daringly toward the camera. A sense of fevered danger permeates the pictures. 

“I was definitely a bit of a troublemaker growing up,” he admits. Yet, despite the riotous undercurrent, there’s also an overriding sense of hopefulness in the pages of So Far So Good. Even the name of the book is tentatively positive. “The theme is optimistic but also questions, ‘What’s next?’” he explains. “I always think about how far you can push something until you hit breaking point. It’s a question I’ve often asked myself when I felt things were going too far in a negative way. I wanted the book to question that a bit as well, and I think the title is very fitting in that sense.”

As well as being an ode to his friends and the skateboard community that embraced him, So Far So Good is also a love story with New York itself. “New York is very chaotic and there is always something happening,” he says. “The streets are filled with excitement. It makes me always want to carry a camera because I never know what I’ll see. I think New York gives me a constant sense of attention and curiosity.”

The book preserves a sense of Zangas’ own transition from adolescence to adulthood but also immortalises his wider community during this seminal five-year period. In a city that moves so quickly, even his relatively recent pictures are already artefacts of the past. “Looking back at these images, everything looks so different now… the clothes people wear, the buildings, the cars, the streets. New York is constantly changing and people are too… I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but I think one day it will be cool to look back and interesting to see the directions everyone’s life took.”

Nolan Zangas’ So Far So Good is published by Blurring Books and is available here now.