The grid: David Katzenstein’s fuzz-toned travel photos

Killian Fox

The American photographer’s unconventional images capture the fleeting moments of life on the move

Photographers usually go to great lengths to make sure their images are sharp and clear, often relying on expensive equipment to keep fuzziness at bay. In his series Brownie, shot between 1979 and 1989 with an ultra-basic Kodak Duaflex (a successor to its pioneering Brownie camera from 1900) and collected in a new book of the same name, David Katzenstein took a different approach.

The photographs taken in places such as Haiti and Peru, as well as Katzenstein’s home town of New York, are unconventionally framed and often out of focus in provocative ways. Nonetheless they create an extraordinarily rich and vivid picture of the world and, in the process, challenge our notions of what photography can be.

Brownie by David Katzenstein is published by Hirmer