In January of 2011, I moved to Manhattan to pursue a master’s degree in social work, but once I arrived, the city remade me. I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and spent my undergraduate years as a student athlete in Storm Lake, Iowa. Photography, once a hobby, quickly became my lifeline. It became a way of bearing witness, of staying alive in the unrelenting flow of the city. My camera, a Leica, became an extension of my body. I turned to the streets, and the city itself became my collaborator and my confessor.
—Andre Wagner, 2025
For more than a decade, Andre D. Wagner has explored and documented New York City street life, with a particular focus on the changing landscape of Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he has lived and worked since 2011. His work offers an intimate portrait of city life shaped by connection, responsibility, and care. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Wagner came to New York to pursue a degree in social work, but ultimately found his voice through the camera. He is also deeply committed to photographic processes, developing his own black-and-white negatives and making gelatin silver prints in his own darkroom. Wagner’s work belongs to a lineage of American street photography that investigates the social landscape and addresses questions of race, class, and identity. His photographs capture the joys and hardships of Black life in the city: moments of tenderness and distance, humor and melancholy, solitude and communion.
Andre D. Wagner: New City, Old Blues, representing the 2025 Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize, features work made between 2014 and 2024, much of it never published before. The book also includes an essay by the acclaimed writer Hanif Abdurraquib.
Andre D. Wagner (American, b. 1986) is a 2022 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow in Art. His photographs have been commissioned by The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, W Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time, and Vogue, among other publications. For the 2019 movie Queen & Slim he photographed the iconic key art and the promotional campaign’s leading images. Wagner’s photographs have appeared in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and North Carolina. His first monograph, Here for the Ride, was published by Creative Future in 2017.
Link to Steidl
