That Man from Queens 

Some years ago, during the Bush administration, I answered an advertisement on Craigslist. It was a vague ad asking things like are you an observant person, do you enjoy working alone, are you adventurous? Out of a mixture of curiosity and boredom I responded. A few days later I had a reply, requesting an interview. With nothing really to lose I decided to show up for the interview even though it was unclear what I was interviewing for. I arrived at a non-descript door on Fifth Avenue near the Flatiron building, rang the buzzer and was instructed to take the elevator to the second floor. The elevator door opened directly into the office, I exited the elevator and walked towards the empty desk at the center of the room; moments later a tall and painfully thin man appeared from a back door. He was dressed in baggy jeans that hung low on his waist, an oversized t-shirt, and a baseball hat set backwards on his head. His voice was deep and phlegmy, indicating he had already smoked far too many cigarettes in his thirty something year old life. He held a paper in his hand, handed it to me with a pen and directed me to a table where I was to fill it out. As fast as he appeared he receded into a back office, where I could make out his silhouette behind the smoky glassed wall. I settled into my chair and began to fill out the questionnaire. I can’t quite recall all of the questions but I believe the list began with: what color was the front door? Followed by: How many floors are in the building? Who rode the elevator with you? Were they male or female, how tall, what age, ethnicity, what were they wearing, what color hair, eyes, height, weight? What floor were they going to? This line of questioning was a total surprise. I did my best to answer all the questions and as I was finishing, the man appeared again, took the questionnaire from the table and said he’d be in touch.  I let myself out.

When I got a call from the man late that evening, asking me to come back for a second interview, my husband tried to dissuade me, but I was compelled to find out what this job was all about., arriving the next morning determined to press the man for some information. I walked the two blocks from the train station paying careful attention to everything around me, making mental notes of the people I passed: white male 5 feet 8 inches, blue pants, white button down shirt. I was going to be ready this time. 

When the elevator door opened, the man was waiting for me. He leaned into the door preventing me from exiting, handed me a phone and said “There is an African American woman wearing a red shirt on the southeast corner of 23rd street and 5th avenue, she has a brown bag in her hands, follow the bag. Be sure not to be noticed. Use this phone to tell me where the bag goes”. I left the office feeling a bit nervous but exhilarated, my senses were on fire, every fiber of my being was awake and alert. I appeared as any other person on the street talking into a phone, but that wasn’t so- I was in pursuit of a woman and a bag. I found her exactly where he said she would be, and began to follow, she headed north. Two blocks later she handed the bag to a white man, he headed west for three blocks, crossed the street, I relayed all of this information in real time over the phone, and when the man with the bag ducked into a building, the man on the other end of the phone told me to come back to the office. Thus began my short-lived life as a freelance spy. 

In the ensuing two years I followed people on foot, hid in blacked out vans, did car chases, wore disguises, and wrote up intel reports. It was my job to look past the surface of things, make connections between people, and construct narratives. I had to try to understand relationships and the inner workings of people’s behavior. Piecing together complicated organizations and systems was a matter of course, and seeing the world from this perspective was thrilling. We would make up nicknames for the people we followed. I knew where they lived, where they worked, and who they associated with. I went along with this outrageous career shift knowing that as a photographer, watching people was a common part of the experience, it felt familiar. Seeing past the façade, honing in on details, and searching beyond the recognizable had always been a vital part of my practice. But equally as enthralling was being an insider and having access to information that was only shared or understood by a few. While everyone else in this city was shopping, working, having coffee, lunching, going to meetings, I was prowling the streets gathering information and watching a veiled operation. 

The parallels between my process working under cover and my practice as an artist were undeniable. In fact, one would often feed into the other and the clearest evidence of that is in All The Queens Men, a body of work I began in 1999 and concluded in 2013. I remember as a child people would ask “Are you Danny Murray’s kid?”, and when I answered yes, I could sense that it meant something, like somehow that was all they needed to know, the gaps in what they knew about me had been filled in with my affirmation, and that extended both ways. Growing up in a place where my family had lived for generations, makes me an automatic insider, and with that, there is a strange sense of ownership and that kind of possession extends to the landscape. The trees I climbed, the bike paths I rode, the abandoned lots I played in, the school I went to, the bridge I hung out under; I shared these experiences with my family past and present. The roots run deep, and so too do the relationships I have with the men. Of course, they know me as a photographer but more importantly they understand me as their daughter, sister, cousin, niece, friend, and Danny Murray’s kid. 

Watching men gather in groups, seeing how they interacted, trying to figure out hierarchies, power dynamics, was central to my interest in photographing these men, and they were great to look at. They communicated so much about what they were thinking and feeling through their bodies, gestures, expressions. So, I led with looking, hoping to uncover a palpable description of masculinity. At the start of the project I was absorbed in describing a coldness in the men, thinking that perhaps something tangible could be found there. As I looked at their gestures and discovered how they signaled distrust, I began to think about pictures that would describe the ways in which their bodies navigated the streets, hoping to reveal a connection between the physiological and the psychological. Inserting the men into a landscape that mirrored their strength and complex beauty further cemented them to a place, essential to creating the narrative. I liked to see how they held their ground-- each of them seemed to plant themselves in defiance, needing to project strength though somehow that desire also hinted at a deep secretive vulnerability. By 2001 the world had changed and so too did the countries’ concision. We had all experienced a trauma and it seemed logical to me that the men I was photographing could represent our collective insecurity. For no amount of physical power could eradicate our defenselessness. I began to look for ways for these men to carry this idea, placing them in interior spaces, drawing them closer to their families, where their need to protect was most visible. I photographed their scars, intimate exchanges, and moments of isolation, looking for a tenderness that I had always known them to possess. I had access to their private lives because I am a part of those lives. Their world was my world, I am an insider, and that perspective both informed and echoed my experiences in the surveillance industry. 

Now that That Man from Queens is running the country, I have been thinking a great deal about why and how that came about. I’ve been induced to scrutinize All The Queens Men from this new reality, and have come to the conclusion that being made to feel like you are an insider can be very seductive. I know the man from Queens running the country positions himself as the ultimate outsider, but his rhetoric is all insider. It’s safe to say that a good number of the men I photographed voted for this outcome. I haven’t taken an official tally but I’ve argued with enough of the guys in the months leading up to the election to know which direction they were going in. If the narrative we’ve been sold holds true that working class men felt left behind, ignored, and marginalized then I can take some comfort in knowing that when no one else was looking, I was looking, and I don’t regret it.

This essay was written in June 2017 for Dear Dave Magazine issue 26