Advance Praise for How We Live Now (available Aug. 25, 2020)

“This is a love story—for one particular man in the love affair that began as the pandemic did, for the city of New York and its people coping with an unanticipated catastrophe, for what words can do, for the light and darkness, shade and illumination of black and white street photography, for wandering and encountering and seeing, for being truly a citizen of the city and an inhabitant of the streets. Even at a moment when we were all supposed to withdraw from each other, HOW WE LIVE NOW reaches out.” — Rebecca Solnit

“Bill Hayes has unwrapped a New York under wraps during the lockdown. He is, in his photos and writings, the great poet of the everyday.” — Edmund White

Booklist review:

“Completed in early May of this year, Hayes’ (‘Insomniac City,’ 2017) latest is an achingly timely and moving portrait, in words and photographs, of New York City during the current global COVID-19 pandemic. Describing himself as “a loner and an introvert (except when it comes to strangers),” Hayes has long celebrated the beauty of New York and its people in his street photography (previously gathered in ‘How New York Breaks Your Heart,’ 2018). Interspersed among journal-like chapters, he shares new photos, some of which are before-and-afters: a busy, brake-lit 8th Avenue in December 2019, precedes a black-and-white image from the same vantage point, the street deserted, in April of this year; a June 2019 photo of a city stoop overflowing with Pride revelers is followed by a stark image of a woman sitting alone in March 2020. Mourning his and his city’s giant losses and expressing melancholy for what may never be again, Hayes also finds joy in surprising things, like cooking for himself and joining a “metaphorical bread line” outside his favorite bookshop, and in sweet, affectingly related memories.”

Publishers Weekly review:

“In this somber reflection, author and photographer Hayes (Insomniac City) chronicles life in New York City during the Covid-19 pandemic. Hayes’s question perfectly sums up the times: ‘What if I looked out and saw no cars at all? Not one. As if every last person in Manhattan were taken by this pandemic, except for me, standing alone up here.’ Images of empty streets and subways, when juxtaposed with Hayes’s recollections—mostly of romances and amusing encounters with other New Yorkers—make for a startlingly potent contrast and show how abruptly life shifted from the pre-coronavirus world to the ‘new normal’ of today. Hayes captures acts of kindness during the pandemic: shopkeepers providing for their community, medical personnel on break or in training, and a woman making a mandala. The volume also provides an occasion for reflection, ‘In the enforced solitude and silence, you can sometimes hear yourself replaying moments in your life, things said or not said, done or not done, love expressed or not expressed, all the gratitude you’ve ever received, all the gratitude you’ve ever felt.’ Hayes’s photos movingly capture a fraught and frightening moment in history.”

“A portrait of the poetic neurologist of ‘Awakenings,’ shot at the end of his life, takes a tender and thrilling look at the sacred demons that drove him…”

Review by Owen Gleiberman for “The Hollywood Reporter”

The title of the new documentary “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life” bounces off the title of the essay that Sacks published in The New York Times on Feb. 19, 2015 (“My Own Life”), days after he’d received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. (He died on Aug. 30, 2015.) It‘s a deceptively plain title. For Sacks, in his impish way, was suggesting that his own life, if you looked at it closely enough, might bear more than a passing resemblance to the idiosyncratic and richly freakish lives he chronicled in his case-study portraits that were really a form of wide-eyed literary biography.

Sacks wrote about people in extreme states — of sensory and neurological damage, of awareness and sheer being. And “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life,” directed by the redoubtable Ric Burns (“Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film”), is a portrait at once tender and thrilling, a movie that presents us with a man who led an eccentrically defiant, at times reckless existence that was the furthest thing from cunningly planned. He was a wanderer in the body of a clinician, like Jack Kerouac crossed with Jonas Salk. He was that rare if not unique thing, a scientific navigator of the soul.

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This is very nice: The latest episode of the BBC radio program “GREAT LIVES” profiles Oliver Sacks. I was honored to join the Irish neurologist & author Suzanne O’Sullivan to discuss his life and career. The biggest highlight: several very well chosen clips from the BBC archives of Oliver himself, including a wonderful bit with him reading from “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” 30 minutes long.

I am happy to report that my first book, “Sleep Demons” (2001), long out of print, is now available in a new edition, with a new preface and cover, from the University of Chicago Press.  Of the updated edition, P.D. Smith writes in The Guardian:  “Part memoir, part scientific history, this is an intimate and beautifully written book that brings the research alive in a heartfelt and deeply personal narrative.”

And, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings notes:  “Insomniacs everywhere:  This gem by Bill Hayes is for you.”   Full article here.

Many thanks to the University of Chicago Press and to my editor, Nancy Miller.

By Peter Stamelman – Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Author and photographer Bill Hayes is originally from Spokane, Washington, a city not usually associated with strolling, or with producing flaneurs. But Hayes does love walking and he does love taking pictures.

As the Paris Review says, the flaneur is not just a stroller, but a “passionate wanderer emblematic of 19th-century French literary culture.”

“Strictly speaking, I don’t consider myself a flaneur,” Hayes said. “In fact, I’m afraid I wasn’t even aware of the French tradition of flanerie. I had, of course, read Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ [Sontag has a chapter on flanerie and street photography in the book] and although I do love much of Sontag’s nonfiction, that particular book never made a huge impact on me. I think I found it a little too self-consciously contrary — especially her words on [Diane] Arbus!”

I ask Hayes how he would describe his style of photography.

“Well, certainly street photography is a good description. But I never set out to ‘be’ something, or act in some ‘way,’ particularly with a camera,” he said. “Instead, my taking up a camera and exploring New York came from a combination of natural curiosity, intense loneliness (my longtime partner in San Francisco had died unexpectedly and suddenly not too long before I moved to NYC and I didn’t know many people here) and simple joy in what I was discovering and seeing. And a desire to create pictures (which were at first simply for myself), something which I had wanted to do for a long, long time.”

Of the 150 images in the book, some fifteen were taken in Brooklyn. Among the most memorable: two cooks on a break behind a deli in Brooklyn Heights, a Crown Heights couple bundled up and holding hands on a blustery winter’s day and two moving men playing cards in the back of their van in Greenpoint. Hayes possesses the rare gift of making the quotidian look singular.

I begin the interview by asking him if he was intimidated by all the New York street photographers who have preceded him.  The following are edited excerpts of our conversation:

Brooklyn Eagle: With so many iconic New York City street photographers – Berenice Abbott, Paul Strand, Sid Grossman, Helen Levitt, Ruth Orkin – having already photographed so encyclopedically, were you worried that there was nothing new to capture?

Bill Hayes: (Laughing) No, I wasn’t worried because this is my experience of New York, my New York. I wasn’t trying to imitate someone else but just to photograph the city the way I saw it and the way I was exploring it. And the truth is that, at the outset when I moved here, I didn’t have in mind that I would do a book and have a show. I was doing a fair amount of picture-taking and in the process falling in love with New York City.

Eagle: And you moved here from San Francisco?

BH: Well, I moved here in 2009 from San Francisco, where I had lived for 25 years, but I’m originally from Spokane. I was raised in Spokane and went to college in the Bay Area. So before I moved here, all my life had been spent on the West Coast.

Eagle: Who were the photographers who influenced you?

BH: I wouldn’t say “influenced,” I would say “inspired” me. The top three would definitely be Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Peter Hujar.

Eagle: So that’s your holy trinity?

BH: Yes. And Arbus I discovered very early. As I mentioned, I grew up in Spokane. There was only one nice bookstore. And when I was about 14 or 15 I discovered the classic ‘Aperture Monograph.’ And it made a huge impact for its view of New York City, for its subject matter. Also for the really straight-forward, clean way she takes portraits — very straight on.  That definitely had a lasting impact on me.

Eagle: And what about Winogrand?

BH: It wasn’t until later that I got to know Winogrand’s work. When I moved to San Francisco, one of my first jobs was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. And the same year I started there, Sandra Philips was appointed curator of photography. Now I was just this low-level person working in the communications office, but I wrote the press release for her appointment and we got to know each other. And she used to let me tag along while she was assembling and putting together shows. Every lunch break, I’d be following her around, from gallery to gallery. And during my time there she did a seminal Winogrand show. So I learned a lot about Winogrand and fell in love with his work. Different from Arbus … I loved the speed of his work and the joy he took in photographing New York City. Now my New York City work is very different from his; I’m doing portraits and his work was much more “invisible” street photography.

Eagle: Now during all this time were you yourself photographing?

BH: No, and I think that’s important for you to understand. I was not photographing. I didn’t pick up a camera and start photographing until 2007. But in all those years I was absorbing and paying attention and I loved photography. I was always going to gallery and museum photography shows and I began to imagine the kind of photography I wanted to do. So when the time finally came I was just ready.

Eagle: can you talk a bit about Peter Hujar, the third photographer who inspired you?

BH: Hujar came later, around the time when [Robert] Mapplethorpe sort of exploded. I was very interested in Mapplethorpe’s work for sure but I was more drawn to Hujar, whose work I find more restrained, of course [compared to Mapplethorpe], and more elegant. He did do street photography but it is his portraits I really love. I think what I’m trying to do with my photograph is to bring that same Hujar elegance, that same sort of hushed quality, to my street photography.

Eagle: So at what point did you begin photographing?

BH: When I moved to New York City in 2009 is when I seriously began photographing. I had bought a camera in 2007 in San Francisco and did a little bit there, but San Francisco doesn’t have the kind of street life that we have here. But when I moved here I almost immediately went out and started taking the kind of photographs that I still take today and that are in “How New York Breaks Your Heart.”

Eagle: Were you still an avid photography exhibition-goer? Did you see shows at Museum of Modern Art, at the Metropolitan, the Whitney Museum of American Art?

BH: Yes, always, often with my late partner Oliver Sacks. He was knowledgeable about a lot of things and not surprisingly he was extremely knowledgeable about the history of photography. As a boy he had loved chemistry, so much so that he wanted to be a chemist. And he had his own darkroom at home and he loved the chemistry of photography. So he knew a lot about that side of photography. And we went to see everything from 19 century photography exhibitions to contemporary shows at galleries.

Eagle: How did you and Oliver first meet?

BH: We met when Oliver wrote me a letter. I was still living in San Francisco at the time (2008) and out of the blue I got a letter in the mail with the return address “Oliver Sacks.” Of course I knew his work, but nothing more. He had read my most recent book “The Anatomist,” a nonfiction narrative account of the story behind the 19th-century classic text “Gray’s Anatomy.” He simply wrote to say how much he’d enjoyed it. I wrote back and then a correspondence ensued. We met in person once before I actually moved to New York, but we didn’t become involved and fall in love until after I moved here. We would go often on Friday or Saturday nights to the Met to see exhibits. [Note: Oliver Sacks died in August of 2015.]

Eagle: When you were shooting the photos for this book, did you literally carry your camera with you every time you leave your apartment. And do you always leave the apartment with a plan, an itinerary?

BH: No, it’s much more random. Sometimes I would leave the apartment and not even be sure in which direction I was going to set out. But my approach to the material is still the same as the very first day I started photographing: I always ask permission. I always say, “May I take your picture?” So my photos became on-the-spot portraits. Even my earliest pictures have that same straight-on portraiture feeling. And, at first, I only took the photographs for myself and for Oliver.

Eagle: What made you decide to go public?

BH: A couple of things: More and more of my friends and my family saw them and liked them and that gave me confidence I suppose. But really the turning point was writing my memoir “Insomniac City,” which came out last year. The book has an unconventional structure; it’s composed of essays, vignettes, letters, journal entries and street photographs. And it felt very natural; photography seemed like another way to tell stories. The photographs in the book come and go, like people one encounters on the street. So I wove into [“Insomniac City”] about 40 photographs; they don’t come with stories, they just appear. And the reaction to them really surprised me: people really liked them! And that convinced me to do a complete book of photographs and “How New York Breaks Your Heart” seemed like a good title.

Eagle: An excellent title for an exceptional collection of images. Here’s to your taking many more!

BH:  Thank you, Peter.

Big thanks to Interview Magazine and writer Ngozi Nwadiogbu for this very nice piece on my new book (click on photo):

Bill Hayes: How New York Breaks Your Heart
February 15th – March 17th, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday February 15th, 2018, 6-8 p.m.

Steven Kasher Gallery presents the first ever exhibition of photography by Bill Hayes. A love letter to New York City, the exhibition How New York Breaks Your Heart features 24 black-and-white and color photographs. Hayes photographs ordinary New Yorkers at their most expressive and at their most fleeting, bringing the texture of the city to life. The exhibition launches the publication of a book of the same name, published by Bloomsbury, which features 150 photographs from the series woven through with Hayes’s lyric reflections.

Hayes cites Garry Winogrand, Peter Hujar and Diane Arbus as his artistic influences. Much like Arbus, Hayes photographs people on the streets of New York at close range with a straight on composition. But as the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out, “[Hayes’s] photos are reminiscent of Diane Arbus’ street portraits, the difference being that Arbus was drawn to the strangeness in people while Hayes is drawn to their warmth and beauty.” Former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins says, “It’s in these ocular embraces that we feel the humanity and the beautiful eccentricity of individuals being revealed. Hayes gives us glimpses into the souls of the city’s characters in these arresting on-the-spot portraits.”

Street photography purists seek invisibility and don’t engage with their subjects beforehand. On the contrary, Hayes always ask his subjects if he can take their picture, creating a momentary intimacy. “I want to create portraits, but taken on the spot, on the fly, with no set-up or props, and only using natural light.”

Bill Hayes is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction and the author of four books, Sleep Demons (2001), Five Quarts (2005), The Anatomist (2009) and the critically acclaimed memoir Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me (2017).

Bill Hayes: How New York Breaks Your Heart will be on view February 15th-March 17th, 2018.  Opening Reception:  February 15, 6-8 PM.

Steven Kasher Gallery is located at 515 W. 26th St., New York, NY 10001. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM.  For inquiries, please contact Cassandra Johnson, 212-966-3978, [email protected]

“How New York Breaks Your Heart. . . immortalizes ordinary people in the city that never sleeps.” – The New York Times

“A photographic love letter to New York City and its people that is sparse in text but loaded with images and feeling. . . . Hayes succinctly and sensitively traces what he has identified as the stages of falling in love with New York and getting one’s heart broken by it. . . [An] affecting portrait of the city’s vibrant people, and the social and solitary effect of living among them.” – Publishers Weekly

Available for preorder.  On sale February 13, 2018.