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Navigating New York City’s sidewalks requires patience, fortitude, fancy footwork, and strict adherence to myriad underwritten rules – keep up the pace, don’t walk three abreast, no eye contact, no sudden stopping. Ande woe to anyone who fails to comply. As writer Russell Baker once said: “New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.”

What most New Yorkers regard as a tolerable nuisance, photographer Gus Powell, 29, sees as a vital stage for unpredictable dramas that unfold in a serendipitous urban ballet of humanity. Like the director of an improvisational troupe of unwitting strangers, Powell prowls Manhattan’s midtown sidewalks, waiting for the millisecond when light, movement, color, space, and narrative coalesce to create the perfect emotional clapboard snap.

Powell’s book The Company of Strangers (J&L Books, 2003) features 58 such moments caught near Times Square in 2001 and 2002, during his lunch breaks from working as a photo editor at The New Yorker. The project was inspired by famed New Yorker alumnus Frank O’Hara, who spent his own lunchtime in the ‘50’s banging out poems in the nearby Olivetti showroom. Powell’s photographs,, shot at middle distance with a wide-angle lens, owe their impact as much to the city’s unique collision of harsh midday light, deep shadows, and hard-surface reflections as they do to the jostling human do-si-do. It’s movement, change, and tiny visual ironies that inspire Powell most, whether shooting his own work or choosing images for ˆThe New Yorker. “All photographs are either nouns or verb,” he says. “The better picture is a verb, because something is happening.”

Shooting spectators in crowds, he says, offers a wealth of opportunity to capture emotion because “you can go right up to people.” Powell, who credits Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, and Robert Frank as influences, is also inspired by Weegee’s mastery of recording crowds at crime scenes. The newsman’s influence is evident in Powells’s poignant images of stunned New Yorkers peering at electronic news displays in Times Square during September 11, 2001, and clustering at barricades weeks later at the World Trade Center site (featured in Worth magazine and Canada’s National Post, respectively).

Powell’s latest project, a landscape series, might seem a complete turnabout from his street shots, but there are actually many parallels to be found. Here, as on the street, Powell seeks out subtle moments in which the prosaic kisses the sublime. In these images something is always slightly, disturbingly askew – a sweeping desert vista interrupted by an RV off to the side; a beautiful tree nailed through with a block of wood. Whether in the country or on the street, though, Powell says, “I’m responding immediately to the location and space.”

Powell grew up in New York City’s Upper East Side, the only child of a fashion designer mother and a documentary filmmaker father. While a teenager at tending the Trinity School, he regularly toted a camera around the city and considered a future in photojournalism until he saw and exhibit of Bruce Davidson’s subway photos, which made him realize he was more interested in “seeing things in my own way than the who-what-where-how.” A family friend, the renowned art director Tony Palladino, taught him how to recognize esthetic appeal in the unexpected, such as the smashed hubcaps the youth would scavenge for him on the F.D.R. Drive. Of this time, Powell says: “I began to realize that the vernacular and quotidian are ripe with esthetic four-leaf clovers.” Today, he is certainly learning how to pick them.