Emily Ho

To be a witness to something is to experience firsthand. The witness perspective I chose was that of the street. New York City is undeniably one of the busiest and most diverse in the world. Every street and neighborhood has witnessed and held endless stories of rich culture and history. The city’s streets are deeply interconnected, yet each can be experienced on an intimate scale—ranging from the chaos of main commercialized avenues to the quieter, less glamorous neighborhoods where families reside. Litter and discarded objects often go unnoticed, yet each plays a role in reflecting the character of an area.

My final piece, “Curb Appeal” is a catalogue of found street “trash” collected from three distinct areas in the city: Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, and Chinatown. Each item is listed with its corresponding coordinates, yet there is no permanence or guarantee it will still be there. This magazine serves as a collection of frozen moments in time, a documentation of unfinished stories. I included both images of the items themselves and of their surrounding location, inviting the reader to imagine the connections between these discarded objects and the places they once occupied.