In 2009, British photographer and frequent Baxter and Bailey collaborator Alys Tomlinson travelled to New York to begin working on a set of images. The photographs would document some of the strangers she was to encounter on a series of long walks along Broadway. Alys returned to Broadway several times over the following years to work on the project, as her interest in the wildly diverse thoroughfare grew.
The result of these solo expeditions is Following Broadway, a collection of 40 images that offer a fascinating social documentary of some of the Big Apple’s population. To accompany an exhibition at London's Protein Gallery in 2014, Alys approached us to design a book which would collect a selection of her Broadway images.
We displayed the images uncropped and following the geographical order in which they were shot along the 13 mile length of Broadway. A wraparound dust-jacket catalogues each shot in the book, numbering and placing them on the New York street map. As Alys says of the photographs in a recent interview with Dazed magazine: "I guess there's something quite flattering about being picked out from thousands of people. It was an exchange of sorts. I’d take their picture and, for a brief moment, they’d allow me into their world."