In My Taxi by American photographer Ryan Weideman began in New York City in 1980, soon after he arrived in Manhattan and started driving a cab on the 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. shift; over the next four decades, through 2016, he photographed the people who climbed into his back seat, turning the taxi into a mobile portrait studio.
Because the work grows out of night driving, it examines the city as an after-hours stage where identity is performed and briefly let down. The taxi functions as an in-between space: intimate but transactional, private but surrounded by the street. Weideman’s portraits map a cross-section of New York’s late-20th-century social life—businessmen, club kids, drag queens, poets, and tourists—without sorting them into hierarchies.
Visually, the photographs are dense, often layering three zones at once: the driver in the foreground, passengers in the midground, and the city’s sidewalks and headlights framed through the windows. The work is black-and-white, emphasizing faces, clothing, and the textures of cab upholstery and street glare. Flash-lit interiors collide with darkness, producing abrupt contrasts that recall film noir: a cheekbone catches the flash, a hand pauses halfway through a gesture, and the street outside blurs into a backdrop behind the seated figures.
Weideman worked with hand-held analog cameras and a strobe, sometimes rigging the flash to his visor and keeping the camera accessible near the taxi meter so he could shoot quickly between stops. After driving, he developed film and printed in a small apartment, converting his bathroom into a darkroom; many prints are gelatin silver, with published reproductions appearing as duotone plates. About six or seven years into the project, he began including himself with passengers—an early form of self-portraiture within a street-photography framework—and at times made the encounter collaborative by asking passengers to trigger the strobe when they heard the shutter.
Early support arrived through fellowships (including an NEA fellowship in 1984–1985, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 1986–1987, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992–1993), and the photographs entered major museum collections such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Oakland Museum.
![8 Punk Rockers [with Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys], 1982](https://res.cloudinary.com/dkvtc5ncc/image/upload/c_limit,w_1080/f_auto/q_auto/v1773043964/In_My_Taxi_05_1d1fb5ed72?_a=BAVC1WID0)
