Abstract: The Photo Essay assignment requests is a series of photographs which either evoke a specific emotion, make an argument or bring an issue to light. My Photo Essay is based on the topic of my Poetry Analysis essay, where the two poems share in revealing aspects of our life which may initially seem to be insignificant but in reality play a larger role in their environment. This assignment helped with negotiating my own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre and medium, and rhetorical situation.

Maxim Zorkin

ENGL 21001

Professor Carpenter 

3/8/25

                Photo Essay: Final Draft

In an environment as dense as the urban landscapes which dominate today’s world, the vast development which the city and its elements have gone through in the span of comparatively little time is quite observable. You’ve got the streets, cars, traffic lights, crowds of people, buses and subways, countless stores, and towering skyscrapers. New York is one such city which is known for its busy and restless nature, dubbed “The city that never sleeps”, it is famous for its size and importance and has become the standard of defining urban sprawl. For newcomers it is easy to be overwhelmed by its vast yet varying spaces, districts and neighborhoods. In cities of grand stature such as New York, size matters. In a landscape teetering with colossal towers, flashy venues and busy populace, the smaller, isolated elements of the city gradually fade away from the sight of its inhabitants. As with all things in life, we tend to focus on what we view as important. Our determination of the importance of things is a subjective matter, but amongst ordinary people it can fall into what’s biggest, surprising, eye-catching and awe-inducing. These distinctions aren’t necessarily wrong, but the importance of things doesn’t have to be what can captivate people’s attention. If you take a walk through New York, you’ll recognize the plethora of details that define the image of the city. But can you truly understand what exactly keeps it running? Sustains its growth? Such details are not always visible from a simple glance: It can take a deeper level of understanding in order to see how important a minute detail can be, but sometimes all that’s needed is a simple word. 

A certain poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” possibly best exemplifies this understanding of how we judge the importance of what occupies our lives and surroundings. The poem, written by William Carlos William is well known for its short, imagist style which breaks the rules of conventional poetry: “so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens”. For what little information the four-stanza poem provides, it gives us a single piece of context that transforms the mundane wheelbarrow into a necessary tool which sustains the lifestyle of the people who use it: “So much depends”. Every seemingly insignificant detail that you may stumble upon in the city, much like the wheelbarrow, isn’t just some object which happens to exist in its environment. The city, in this case, is the subject which relies on these details to thrive, to depend on. That can also be shown, with just a simple image.

Traffic control box at W Brighton Ave W Fifth Street 

  Pedestrian and car traffic intersecting at Surf Avenue

Pedestrian and car traffic intersecting at Neptune Avenue

 Turnstiles at Brighton Beach station 

  Trains operating at Coney Island-Stillwell Ave terminal

Trash bags and cans at Surf Avenue awaiting collection

Trash bags and cans at W Second Street

 Garbage from New York processed in a New Jersey treatment facility. Photograph by Cody Boteler