Throughout her career, Brooklyn-based photographic artist Amy Touchette has explored themes of social connectedness, making photographs of people within their social groups and communities. A documentarian and a street photographer, Touchette has utilized photography’s power to create authentic portraits of everyday people she connects with on the street. Her critically acclaimed Instagram series Street Dailies (2012-ongoing) is a collection of quintessential New York characters primarily made in the Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bed-Stuy neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The series has been widely published in magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times and Artsy.
Five years after its original release, Street Dailies will now be exhibited on a standard poker-sized deck of playing cards. Touchette writes: “I love the idea of delivering images that have nothing to do with gallery walls or photo books. It just feels really liberating and inclusive to put them in a form everyone knows so well, and that is cheap, portable, and fun — literally, a game!”
The NYC Street Dailies deck of playing cards is Touchette’s homage to New York City and a celebration of the wonderful diversity of its denizens. Each playing card features a unique portrait from NYC Street Dailies, with each suit dedicated to some of Touchette’s favorite muses: grannies (spades), workers (diamonds), twins & sets (clubs) and beloved characters (hearts).
Trained at the International Center of Photography, Touchette began her artistic career as a writer and painter, earning a BA in Literature and Studio Art and an MA in Literature. Her first monograph, Shoot the Arrow: A Portrait of The World Famous *BOB*, was published and funded by Un-Gyve Press (Boston, 2013). Her photographs have exhibited nationally and internationally, including MoMA-Moscow, Leica Gallery-Warszawa, Hamburg Triennial of Photography, and in the US embassies in Vienna, Austria, and Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. Publications include The New York Times, the New York Observer, BUST magazine, Brooklyn Photographs Now published by Rizzoli, and the online platform Artsy.
Images from Touchette’s latest, unreleased series, Personal Ties: Street Portraits of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, will debut at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England, November 7, 2019-February 16, 2020, as part of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition. She frequently gives artists lectures, teaches in the full-time program at the International Center of Photography (ICP), and works as a freelance photography writer for publications that include PDN, PDNedu, Emerging Photographer, and Digital Photo Pro magazine. She is represented by ClampArt in New York City.
The NYC Street Dailies deck of playing cards is now available for purchase at the following locations:
ClampArt, 247 West 29 Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Printed Matter, East Village, 38 St. Marks Place, East Village, Manhattan
Dashwood Books, 33 Bond Street, SoHo, Manhattan
Spoonbill & Sugartown, 218 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
National Portrait Gallery Gift Shop, St Martin’s Place, London, England
The playing cards are also on sale on Amy Touchette’s website www.amytouchette.com
