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Poet Frank O'Hara used to skip out at noon from the Museum of Modern Art, grab a hamburger and, riffing off the activity of New York City's bustling Midtown, compose his famous "Lunch Poems." Forty-five years later, and just a few blocks away, photographer Gus Powell also realized that after a bacon cheeseburger he could be out in what O'Hara called "the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon," using his lunch break and camera to extract rich, intelligent, unpredictable and often funny scenarios from what he says are "not so incredible moments." A self-described city kid and self-taught photographer, Powell says he had always made pictures out in the street, but it wasn't until he met Joel Meyerowitz through a mutual friend that he started taking the work more seriously. "Aside from his sheer enthusiasm, what Joel really turned me on to was paying attention to the entire plane of space out on the street, and making pictures that had an action quality...pictures that permit the viewer to discover them in the same way you discovered them on the street," he says. Powell's street images will soon be published by J+L Books, which will be releasing the work as a collection titled In the Company of Strangers this spring. Meanwhile, he still has his day job as the freelance photo editor for the fiction section of The New Yorker. If looking at countless images a week provides him with a constant stream of inspiration, so do the streets themselves.