Alexander Coggin challenges the “stock-still” with the ephemerality and quiet sadness of life in NYC

The last time It’s Nice That covered photographer Alexander Coggin, he was in-between Berlin and London, and shooting the photographic hell out of his “long-suffering” muse and husband Michael. Now, Alexander is firmly in New York City, revisiting the Eastern seaboard he was born and raised in, and he has a new slew of personal and editorial photographs to show for it, exhibiting his signature style: an ultra-clear focus that flattens everything into almost a 2D image, a magpie-like eye for detail and story and a love for his subjects.

“My eye is doing funny things lately. Being back in America after living for 15 years in between Berlin and London, I’m finding that I’m responding to the state of America with a certain emotional ambiguity and embracing the darkness,” says Alexander. “ I’ve always been committed to ‘nausea’ as a photographic tone, but now I think it’s slipping over into being foreboding.” As an artist, Alexander is naturally interested in the small stuff, mundane scenes such as rubbish bags, red leaves, racks of bicycles, a showerhead, but what makes these things worth photographing? Perhaps it’s the ambient narrative between all things. Perhaps it’s that anything can be beautiful if one looks at it enough. Case and point, a transparent plastic Pret cup for a slurped-up iced latte. For some, it’s literally a throwaway (in subject and photo) but for Alexander, it’s serendipitous. “I feel some kinship with the object – incubated in the UK, bathed in Times Square advertising light,” says Alexander.

Everything is autobiographical here, as Alexander is “committed to bringing as many lights outside the studio as possible” – recreating studio aesthetics to “complex-ify” his lighting, the simple flash will no longer suffice. Although it’s simple, Alexander forewarns “we’re no longer within simple times.” He’s sworn to “entering the world of the hat”, (a reference to Stephen Sondheim’s song Finishing The Hat, a classic tune all about the reverence of everyday objects) and in the process, Alexander is tailoring each subject to its setting, finding each item or person’s most interesting light.

Evidently, Alexander’s storybuilding skills are exercised in a diptych of photos that show a funeral and a birthday, both equally solemn, emotionally vague, intimate but also faraway. There’s worry in the water and something in the air in New York City – and Alexander communicates it, whether it’s through the narrative thread that effortlessly ties everything together, the jobs and routines and lives of transients, the invisible, but deeply felt, waveforms of city-life. Theatre plays a character in these photos – “a face you cannot read is theatre, it is life, it involves the viewer,” says Alexander, as the strange beauty of death and another rotation around the sun somehow become one in the same. “I’ve always been pretty committed to visible, liminal emotionality. Raised in theatre, I enjoy the task of squeezing everything I’ve loved about that ethereal, ephemeral theatre into stock-still and palsied photography. I’m just tryin’ to getch-ya to look a while longer.”