When Stacey Baker spots a good pair of legs, she has to move quickly. Sometimes she races down the sidewalk to catch the woman before she slips out of sight. Sometimes she sidles up and gently introduces herself. Quickly, she persuades the stranger to pose for her by whipping her iPhone out of her pocket, showing some of the images on her @stace-a-lace Instagram account and explaining that she needs the woman to stand up against a particular wall and raise her arms above her head.
Baker does not allow any hands or arms in her pictures. She always frames them so the subject is cut off at the waist. She asks her muse to stand in front of a gritty, textured wall and composes each image so that the heels line up with the horizon line, where the wall meets the sidewalk. By following this disciplined approach, Baker has figured out a way to commandeer a portrait studio out of the chaos of Midtown Manhattan.
A handful were made elsewhere, but all the photographs in this book were taken in New York City. Of these, about a third are made on one block of 40th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues. This block was chosen for practical as much as artistic reasons. Stacey Baker makes many of these pictures on her lunch hour, and this is the block where she works as a photo editor at The New York Times Magazine. The block is rich in women sporting wild legwear.
Baker has found women wearing leggings printed with cats’ faces, peacock feathers, Batman logos, long-stemmed roses, Hokusai’s wave, hearts, crosses, trees, eyeballs, crests, cast- les, stars, lips, eyelashes, fingernails and the word “love” repeated over and over. (…)
It’s no surprise that this series has been so enthusiastically received by the Instagram community. What could have been deemed an objectification or exploitation of women’s bodies has been embraced as the opposite. From the comments on Baker’s account, it is clear that her followers, over 78,000 now, are overwhelmingly female, and they see empowerment, pride and a strutting of personal expression in Baker’s subjects. Her work has become a celebration of the diversity of female shapes.
At this point, Baker has posted over 1,000 pictures. As sometimes happens with artists – the lucky ones – she found a subject that won’t let her go. It crept up on her. First she fell in love with the ease of making pictures with a cellphone. Then she fell in love with the crazy, kaleidoscopic diversity of women’s legs in N.Y.C. The ease of making pictures with a cellphone has sparked a revolution in photography. Baker’s body of work is among the most powerful to come out of this moment in technology, fashion and people watching other people.
Kathy Ryan
Kathy Ryan is the Director of Photography at the New York Times Magazine.
Stacey Baker, New York Legs
Published by Kehrer Verlag
Euro 19,90 / US$ 25.00
ISBN 978-3-86828-698-4
