Jeffrey Ladd

“A great deal of my 16 years in New York has been spent going on walks. Growing up in the suburbs of Arizona and later New Jersey, I noticed I would only walk with a destination in mind. In these city streets, the cliché ‘the journey is the destination’ seems most appropriate.

“It is only fitting that I stumbled across the perfect medium to accompany me on these walks to nowhere, observing rhythms and creating my own fictions as I wear through shoe leather. Street corners and subway platforms alternate their one act plays between comedy and tragedy as people come together for an instant until the streetlight changes in their favor. These rectangles describe fleeting moments that disrupt what was true and make their own truths based on new relationships the real world did not know.

“There is an essay by Robert Frost entitled ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ in which he eloquently describes the act of creating. He states, “It begins with delight, inclines to the impulse, assumes direction of the first line, runs a course of lucky events and ends in a clarification of life.” These words act as my map and compass.”

Born in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania in 1968, Jeffrey Ladd arrived in New York City in 1987 to study photography at the School of Visual Arts. He received his BFA degree in 1991.

Jeffrey’s photographs have been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Howard Greenberg Gallery. His photographs are in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Museum of the City of New York.

Jeffrey Ladd also runs 5B4 a blog about photography books