Luisa Opalesky, Big City Nobody (2024)42 Images
While Christmas is one of the biggest tourist seasons in most major cities, each year during the holidays there is a certain stillness courtesy of the temporary mass migration of city transplants returning to their hometowns. For photographer and movement director Luisa Opalesky, it was a wave of calmness during the pandemic in New York City that inspired her latest project, Big City Nobody.
Released this Christmas, her debut photobook documents intimate moments in the city from 2020 to 2024. On the book’s opening pages is a hand-written note of 20 things she saw during the week of Christmas in 2020. In true chaotic New York City-style, she recounts everything from “dildo shaped human shit on Canal street” and a “six foot, long-haired emaciated Santa” to a “doorman on 250 Broadway belting opera” and “rhinestoned French manicure tip nail in a night puddle on Houston & Bowery”.
Born and raised in Philadelphia to Venezuelan and Lituthanian parents, Opalesky first got a taste of New York life when she spent a summer babysitting in the city as a teenager. “[I was working on] the Upper East Side and I just knew this was where I had to be. It was just the characters on the highest frequency,” she says. “I’m from Philadelphia, so there were great characters everywhere, but not on this level of every corner. [In New York] you’re going to see so many different types of people and I think that was my driving force was to come back and be in the midst of all of the culture.” The following year she moved to New York City to attend Parsons and study photography. “I knew I would never leave and this is when I started school,” she reflects. Over a decade later, she now belongs to a generation of Lower East Side creatives who are an integral part of the city’s creative tapestry.
While there are images from Christmas weeks over the years, the book also features images of quotidian life and outtakes from different assignments for Interview Magazine and The New York Times. Images depict teenage girls recording TikToks in the streets, someone on a stretcher, another person peeing in the park, and Opalesky herself lying prostrate on the floor. There are also appearances from the likes of Aquaria, Raisa Flowers, Parker Posey, Ice Spice, nail artist Mei Kawajiri (known as @nailsbymei) and Julia Fox, who is seen bottle-feeding her young son. Throughout the book, there are also multiple images from heights – a friend’s foot hanging off a balcony, a model lying on the top of an outdoor air conditioning unit, and someone dangling out the window of a highrise building. “It’s such a tall city and I have so much height admiration and altitude obsession,” she explains.
The title Big City Nobody came from a night with stylist and Interview editor-in-chief Mel Ottenberg (also pictured in the book). After belting Fiona Apple’s “Criminal”, she recounts Ottenberg introducing her to new music, notably David Lee Roth’s “Just a Gigolo / i Ain’t Got Nobody” where she thought she heard “big city, nobody”. A strange turn of fate, the lyrics were never actually in the song but as she heard it she knew it encapsulated the theme of the book.
For many, New York City’s intensity is a deterrence but it can also act as a reminder that when so much is happening, we as individuals mean nothing. But that can also be liberating. To be a ‘nobody’ in such a big city can give you the freedom to do whatever you want because no one is paying attention to you. “[There] is such obsession with being needed to be seen and in a world where there is so much attention on local celebrities, big celebrities and other public figures t it gives me so much pleasure and so much safety to be a nobody,” Opalesky explains. “I just kept thinking about that; how beautiful is it to just be able to go wherever you want and be a fly on the wall or be butterfly on a bicycle.”
Alongside the imagery in the book, Opalesky also reached out to some of her favourite writers to contribute their own interpretations of the work and the title. Contributors include Alissa Bennett, Susie Essman, Daniel Arnold, and Teardrop. In Bennett’s essay, she writes “one of photography’s greatest functions is its ability to contain within the image a complete roster of conditions all at one”. More often than not, documentary-style photography is what allows us to see parts of our cities that we would have easily missed when lost in our own lives. Even on the biggest holidays, including Christmas, this photography can give us new perspectives on the world. “I’m thinking about getting my dog a triple XL Grinch sweater and being out in the streets taking photos and commentating,” Opalesky says of her upcoming Christmas plans after the book drops. “I just want people to be inspired and love their fellow cities and human beings.”
Big City Nobody is available here.
