NEW YORK, NY.- Humans are intersecting and inhabiting shared connections every day, in multiple ways, and most of the time not realizing it. Street photographer Teri Vershel notices these nuanced and thought-provoking similarities and celebrates them in her book, Relative Strangers, (Daylight Books, Summer, 2024).

Vershel culled through her archive and utilized her skills curating and sequencing to create narratives and alliances and depth between her images by pairing them in new ways. This project culminated during the Covid lockdown, a time that promoted looking at projects in a different light. In her afterword for the book, Vershel provides insight into her process.

"During the Covid lockdown of 2020, when shooting on the street was not feasible, I decided to make my own book of photographic pairings. I sorted through my archive looking for images that might work well when presented next to each other. As I looked, I found many similarities in gestures and geometry, colors and quality of light. It struck me that, while the people in my photographs are strangers, by comparison they are often related."

The color photographs were taken mostly in the vibrant and diverse regions of the Bay Area of northern California and New York, as well as other locales nationally and internationally. Her design decisions such as creating diptych spreads in the book between most of the photographs, facilitate a collaboration between the images, resulting in yet another layer of content. The individual photographs resonate with their own story and composition, but when paired next to another image, suddenly there are alignments in gesture, color, or energy that remind the viewer that we independent humans are perhaps moving through our days in aligned and shared ways.

Seasoned photographer Sam Abell wrote the foreword for the book and speaking to the factors unique to street photography in particular, he distinguishes the role of the photographer in creating narrative and a 'truth' beyond the concrete factors presented, such as specific people, buildings, colors. He writes:

"But above all, the street, as a subject, is true. True to itself and to our time. It’s fact, not fiction. The street is the opposite of studio work, where control is assured. This is reality street, where what you see is what you get—unless you’re an astute observer like Teri. To her, the street is raw material to be distilled into images that give insight into the poetics of urban existence. The creative equation that begins with critical “street seeing” ends with a refined photograph and a new truth. Teri’s truth."

This visual conversation between photographer and subject is a specific type of engaging with creative process that is particularly prescient within the street photography genre, and Relative Strangers exemplifies this spirit.

Teri Vershel is a fine art street photographer based in the San Francisco Bay area. Her work has been shown at the Los Angeles Center for Photography, DeYoung Museum, Photoville, Harvey Milk Photo Center and the Palo Alto Art Center.

Sam Abell was a staff photographer at National Geographic for 33 years. He has published multiple monographs of his work, and is a writer, teacher, and lecturer on photography.